Wynton Marsalis Newhttp://wyntonmarsalis.org/news
Recent news from Wynton Marsalis.enMon, 11 Dec 2017 10:17:39 +0000Wynton Marsalis recorded a new arrangement of “Jingle Bells” at Spotify Studios in NYChttp://wyntonmarsalis.org/news/entry/wynton-marsalis-recorded-a-new-arrangement-of-jingle-bells
wynton_news_16914Wynton Marsalis, with daughter Oni on vocals, and members of the Jazz at Lincoln Center orchestra, recorded a new arrangement of “Jingle Bells” at Spotify Studios in NYC, dressed in their Brooks Brothers best. Now playing on Spotify. View the full video at BrooksBrothers.com

In the fall of 2016, Wynton Marsalis spoke at an event in Manhattan commemorating the centennial of Albert Murray, the jazz historian, cultural critic and novelist who died in 2013 at age 97. Murray had been a longtime mentor to the trumpeter and composer, ever since he was an 18-year-old Juilliard student. He talked about some of the key lessons he learned at Murray’s knee in the older man’s modest, book-lined apartment on West 132nd Street.
Marsalis said, “If you could get past thinking that Count Basie was ‘old’ … if you could come to grips with time, and how things unfold in time, you could then per- haps put yourself in a context.” Reinforced by many years of tutelage by Murray, he took that lesson to heart: that understanding the historical context of one’s life and work was central to achieving both wisdom and excellence as an artist. It may have contributed to Marsalis’ personal credo: “All jazz is modern,” now the guiding principle for Jazz at Lincoln Center, of which Marsalis and Murray were co-founders.

At 56, Marsalis is among the youngest living artists ever inducted into the DownBeat Hall of Fame. If he had only been the leading trumpeter of his generation, there’s little doubt he eventually would have made it into the hallowed hall. But it’s his tireless work as an educator, bandleader, fundraiser, non-profit executive, and advocate for jazz and American culture that probably sealed the deal so soon.

His accomplishments are the consequence of soaring ambition, outsize talent, charisma, thirst for knowledge and a erce work ethic. His Twitter bio is as accurate as it is succinct: “Internationally acclaimed musician, compos- er, educator and a leading advocate of American culture. Managing and Artistic Director of Jazz at Lincoln Center.”

That description understates his fame. He is arguably the most famous jazz musician in the world, but beyond his celebrity, Marsalis is also jazz’s most renowned intellectual and fiercest champion. No individual in jazz has done more to advance both jazz education and the international appreciation of jazz in the last 50 years.
Most jazz musicians who have risen to the top of their profession would be happy to have a Grammy or two. For Marsalis, however, his nine Grammy Awards are just the tip of the ice- berg. He is the only musician to have received Grammy awards in both the jazz and classi- cal categories in the same year (1983), and he repeated this remarkable feat in 1984. He has released more than 60 jazz and classical albums since 1982.

As significant to jazz as any music Marsalis ever wrote or played was his central role in creating Jazz at Lincoln Center in 1987. A pivotal moment—for both the organization and jazz in general—came in 1996, when JALC, which had started as a program and grew into a department, was incorporated as a new and equal constituent of Lincoln Center, alongside the New York Philharmonic, Metropolitan Opera and New York City Ballet. It represented a major achievement in Marsalis’ lifelong mission to foster the appreciation of jazz in the country of its birth.

Today, JALC is the largest nonprofit organization promoting jazz in the country, with a $43 million endowment and a sta of more than 140. After a herculean fundraising campaign, it moved into its current home at the Time Warner Center in 2004. The complex houses three concert and performance spaces (Rose Theater, The Appel Room and Dizzy’s Club Coca-Cola) engineered specifically to enhance the sound of acoustic jazz. JALC webcasts hundreds of concerts a year, all available for free.

JALC’s educational outreach programs include the Essentially Ellington program, which now provides jazz curriculums to nearly 5,000 high schools in the United States and sponsors the country’s biggest national competition for high school jazz bands; an expanding archive of about 1,000 free instructional jazz videos; and many other initiatives. It also launched its own record label, Blue Engine, in 2015.

DownBeat spoke to Marsalis in his dressing room at Jazz at Lincoln Center. There was a corner desk strewn with family photos and sheet music, a Steinway baby grand and framed pictures on the wall of Clark Terry and other trumpet heroes.

As leader of the 15-member Jazz at Lincoln Center Orchestra (JLCO), he has become close to the musicians, all of whom are outstanding soloists. Ten of them compose and arrange for the ensemble. At any given performance, most of the arrangements and many of the compositions are by orchestra members, with the strong encouragement of Marsalis.
“I’ve been surrounded by absolute killers for a long time,” Marsalis said. “And the depth of the love I have for them is hard for me to express.”

The musicians love him back. Trumpeter Marcus Printup, who has been with the JLCO for 24 years, said, “I’ve never met a bandleader who is so unselfish. Everyone understands our roles in the band. We also know who he is. But Wynton doesn’t like it to be about himself; he wants it to be about the band. Sometimes I’ll say to him, ‘This is your band,’ and he’ll say, ‘No, this is our band.’ There are times when I’ll have two or three solos, and he’ll have just one. And I’ll say to him, ‘You should play, because people want to hear you.’ And he’ll say, ‘No, I’ve been playing for 30 years, man. I want the people to hear you.’ That’s just the kind of cat he is.”

Although his career has been marked by controversy—and he continues to be a lightning rod in internecine jazz world disputes— most jazz historians and critics agree on his importance. In his book The History of Jazz, author and critic Ted Gioia wrote, “Marsalis must be seen as the key figure who, more than anyone else, vehemently asserted the centrality of [jazz] tradition in the face of fusion and free styles, and aimed to be its preserver, propagator, promoter, and publicist all rolled into one.”

These days Marsalis is more interested in talking about Jazz at Lincoln Center and praising his JLCO colleagues than he is in talking about himself. “When I was younger,” he said, “anytime I won something I’d have to say something negative. And one day, a lady came backstage and gave me a compliment. And, of course, I was like, ‘I can’t play, I didn’t do this or that’; I was being self-deprecating. And she said, ‘So what does that mean for my compliment and my taste?’” He smiled. “So I’ll just say I’m grateful for every opportunity to be considered in any way, at any time. … As I get older, I try to become more grateful and more humble, take up less space. I find that’s the best way to improve.”

In 1982, the year his eponymous Columbia album was released, DownBeat declared 1982 “the year of Wynton Marsalis.” Readers crowned him Jazz Musician of the Year, the album was named Jazz Album of the Year and he was voted the best Trumpeter (“handily defeating Miles in each category,” according to an article in the December 1982 issue).

“No major jazz figure—not Ellington or Armstrong, Goodman or Gillespie—had become so famous, so fast,” Gioia later wrote.

“Our whole field was struggling,” Marsalis said, reflecting on his initial rise to fame. “I liked jazz, but I knew I couldn’t play. It created a kind of pressure between me and the other musicians who could play much better than I thought of as perhaps the most gifted jazz trumpeter in a generation. Today, while his trumpet playing has lost none of its luster, it takes something of a backseat to his prolific composing. His primary instrument today is the JLCO, although sometimes he writes for smaller groups like string quartets and his septet, and sometimes for larger ones, like symphony orchestras.

Alto saxophonist Sherman Irby, who played with the JLCO from 1995 to ’97 then rejoined in 2005, said the Marsalis trumpet style has continued to ripen.
“His sound has gotten fatter and bigger as the years have progressed,” Irby said. “He thinks he doesn’t have as much control as he used to. But he’s able to put more emotion on one note, like Ben Webster. He did me a solid by playing on my new record. … [At one point], he took one note, and the vibration that he put out on his horn had more emotion than anybody else. at’s getting to the essence of what music is all about.”

Marsalis seems to always be composing a major work. A partial list includes the Pulitzer-winning Blood On e Fields, which included elements of blues, work songs, chants, spirituals, New Orleans jazz, Afro-Caribbean rhythms and Ellingtonian big-band jazz; the epic All Rise for big band, gospel choir and symphony orchestra; Congo Square, with Ghanian master drummer Yacub Addy; his 2009 Blues Symphony for symphony orchestra; 2010’s Swing Symphony for orchestra and jazz band; the 2014 Concerto In D for violin; The Jungle, for the New York Philharmonic and JLCO; the list goes on.

While Marsalis has long acknowledged his debt to Duke Ellington, he indicated that another composer had an equally profound effect on him.
“Jelly Roll [Morton] has had the most influence on me in terms of how I put my music together,” he said. “I realized that he uses small components and connects them together, like an Erector Set.
When I was in my early 20s, I started to transcribe “Black Bottom Stomp” and other music by him. … The first piece I wrote that used the Jelly Roll type of concept was called ‘Blue Interlude.’ … Then [I studied] Duke’s original scores. If you look at them, they’ll say, A, B, C, D. Then he’ll put D–C–A; A–D; A–B; A–C. He’s putting it together in that same Jelly Roll type of way. Duke and Jelly Roll are the two that I thought wrote New Orleans counterpoint the best.”

He also studied classical symphonic forms—sonatas, scherzos, slow marches, rondos—and began thinking about jazz in a somewhat similar way: “What are the fundamentals of our thing? I started to write music with those fundamentals.” He often includes blues, African American church music, train sounds (which have a mythic meaning in the South, he said), sultry Johnny Hodges- like alto saxophone wails, brassy Afro- Latin trumpets, call-and-response and New Orleans march rhythms. “I try to always keep all of my music in the music that I write,” he said.

Marsalis disputes the notion, prevalent in New York jazz circles, that JALC has only recently become more open to a broader array of jazz. “ at’s been said since 1999. Now it’s 2017. Exactly what year did it become more open? That’s just bullshit. … When we did Ornette Coleman’s music, people said they couldn’t believe we were doing that; that was years ago. When [drummer] Han Bennink [an icon of European free-jazz] was here, people said they couldn’t believe that; that was in the ’90s, OK?”

The new Blue Engine release, Handful Of Keys (see sidebar), features six piano soloists ranging from tradition-minded virtuoso Dick Hyman to avant-garde pianist/composer Myra Melford. “Did we call Myra so somebody could write something about it, or so that we could appeal to some camp?” Marsalis asked rhetorically. “She can play. And we love playing with her. Our camp is very broad. We have the broadest camp in the world, yet it’s [supposedly] not broad enough. It doesn’t matter. The dogs may bark but the caravan moves on.”

“Other musicians and artists did it with me: Albert Murray, Ralph Ellison, Stanley Crouch, August Wilson, Romare Bearden. Romy did an album cover for me; he gave me books to read. Then there were musicians like Elvin Jones, Gerry Mulligan, John Lewis, Gunther Schuller, my [high school] teachers John Longo and George Jansen, ‘Sweets’ Edison, Clark Terry, all the trumpet players.

“It’s a cycle and a continuum. I have been part of the lives of so many musicians. I love them all. Maurice Brown and Keyon Harrold. Russell Gunn. Tatum Greenblatt. Brandon Lee. Christian McBride—I knew him when he was a 14-year-old kid, playing ‘Skain’s Domain’ on the piano, when I first saw him in Philly. And so many more. I’m proud of them.”

Pianist Diehl was a talented but unseasoned young pianist, just 17 years old, when Marsalis offered him the life-changing opportunity of filling the piano chair of his septet during a European tour. More recently, during rehearsals for JLCO’s 30th anniversary season opener, a tribute to Jelly Roll Morton, Diehl, a featured pianist, found the relationship had changed. No longer a student but a peer, he found the maestro had fewer comments for him.
“Afer the opening night concert he gave a toast to all the musicians, including the young Juilliard students who performed in the concert [Micah Thomas and Joel Wenhardt]. He said, ‘I was your age when JALC began. And older musicians like Sir Roland Hanna, Norris Turney and Joe Temperley were the age I am now, playing in this newly formed band. All those guys are gone now. So when you’re in your 50s and 60s, you’ll ask yourself how have you contributed to this legacy? What will you offer future generations to ensure that it keeps going?’
“It really made me think,” Diehl continued. “Artists can be very self-involved. As Wynton has told me, it’s like building a cathedral: The guys who started it knew they would never see the end of it.”

Jazz at Lincoln Center is the cathedral project in the lifetime of Wynton Marsalis. Asked if he views it as his crowning achievement, he is quick to set the record straight. “No, I don’t feel like it’s an achievement for me personally, because all of us did it. And we’re still doing it. Let me tell you something: Our staff and our board, they’re killing themselves for jazz. JALC has never been about me. It’s like John Lewis told me once: ‘If this is about you, I have some time; if this is about jazz, I have all the time in the world.’”

]]>Thu, 30 Nov 2017 09:10:00 +0000Philadelphia Orchestra finds its groove in Wynton Marsalis concertohttp://wyntonmarsalis.org/news/entry/philadelphia-orchestra-finds-its-groove-in-wynton-marsalis-concerto
wynton_news_16824Thursday night, in the middle of Nicola Benedetti’s playing a cadenza in a violin concerto with the Philadelphia Orchestra, a man walked through the ensemble to a spot just inches from the violinist and started playing drums.

The man was percussionist Christopher Deviney, and, needless to say, the concerto was not the Brahms, Beethoven, or Sibelius.

Wynton Marsalis’ Violin Concerto in D Major, receiving its first Philadelphia Orchestra performance with these concerts, comes with a lot of bells and whistles (literally and figuratively), like orchestra musicians stomping their feet and clapping.

Superficially, at least, it had something in common with the one other work on a program led by conductor Cristian Macelaru. Both the Marsalis and Holst’s The Planets end dramatically, with the music fading away on a repeated pattern into nothingness.

The Planets is welcome on any program. With its unseen voices — here offstage women from the Westminster Symphonic Choir — and organ rumble so low it seems like cosmic wind, the ending never fails to leave us off at what feels like the beginning of some Great Beyond. Macelaru’s way with “Mars, the Bringer of War” could hardly have been more bellicose — though the hard-edged ensemble sound often carried into other movements, where it was less in character with the piece.

If Holst brought us an expansive view of the planets, Marsalis brought us nose to nose with the one we inhabit. Four movements long, his concerto speaks in easy tones, guiding us through familiar American vernacular sounds. It fishes in some of the same waters as Gershwin and Copland (specifically calling on the same sounds Copland did in the party scene in the opera The Tender Land).

Benedetti negotiated the stream of variegated material with great sensitivity to style. The music saunters and dances. A punchy circus-like atmosphere takes over for a bit, commented upon with short quips from the violin. The Blues hovers over the piece in various places.

The orchestrations are some of the loveliest you’ll ever hear — and most inventive. A burlesque section has the violin soloist twisting and teasing. Brass blasts call out, and a couple of trumpets “shout” by blocking and unblocking their bells with cups.

The debauchery doesn’t last. Strings come in and the mood turns sincere. In the end, Marsalis emerges as a musical raconteur of the best sort. Nothing he told us was exactly new, but there was great art in the telling.

]]>Sat, 04 Nov 2017 02:56:00 +0000PBS to honor Tony Bennett in music special with star-studded performanceshttp://wyntonmarsalis.org/news/entry/pbs-to-honor-tony-bennett-in-music-special-with-star-studded-performances
wynton_news_16827WASHINGTON, D.C. — Sharon Percy Rockefeller, president and CEO of WETA Washington, D.C., today announced the talent and broadcast plans for “Tony Bennett: The Library of Congress Gershwin Prize for Popular Song,” a PBS music special honoring Tony Bennett’s receipt of the Library of Congress Gershwin Prize for Popular Song. The program will premiere Friday, January 12, 2018 at 9 p.m. ET on PBS stations nationwide (check local listings). The program will also be broadcast at a later date via the American Forces Network to American service men and women and civilians at U.S. Department of Defense locations around the world. Tony Bennett is the first “interpretive singer” to be the recipient of the Gershwin Prize.

The event, taping on November 15, 2017 at the Daughters of the American Revolution (DAR) Constitution Hall in Washington, D.C., will feature performances by Bennett, as well as Chris Botti, Michael Bublé, Sheryl Crow, Michael Feinstein, Savion Glover, Josh Groban, Wé McDonald, Brian Stokes Mitchell, Vanessa Williams and a special presentation by Wynton Marsalis — with Bruce Willis as host and Gregg Field as music director (program subject to change). During the event, Bennett will be presented the Gershwin Prize by Carla Hayden, Librarian of Congress, and a delegation of Members of Congress.

The Library of Congress Gershwin Prize for Popular Song is named in honor of the legendary songwriting team George and Ira Gershwin. The prize is given annually to a composer or performer whose lifetime contributions exemplify the standard of excellence associated with the Gershwins. The Gershwin Prize was first awarded to Paul Simon in 2007, followed by Stevie Wonder in 2009, Sir Paul McCartney in 2010, the songwriting team of Burt Bacharach and Hal David in 2012, Carole King in 2013, Billy Joel in 2014, Willie Nelson in 2015 and Smokey Robinson in 2016.

Bennett is an artist for all ages whose interpretations and re-interpretations have introduced new generations to the Great American Songbook. He is one of a handful of artists to have new albums charting in seven consecutive decades, beginning in the 1950s through the 2010s. Bennett celebrated his 90th birthday on August 3, and the milestone was highlighted with the broadcast of a television special, the release of a new CD and book, and the lighting of the Empire State Building honoring his musical legacy.

“WETA is proud to bring this year’s special performance honoring Tony Bennett to the American people in collaboration with the Library of Congress,” noted Rockefeller. “Sharing these special musical events with the wide public television audience across this country is our continuing honor.”

“Tony Bennett’s extraordinary career has left an indelible mark on music and culture in America,” said Paula A. Kerger, president and CEO of PBS. “As part of our commitment to present the best of the arts to the American public, PBS and our member stations are honored to recognize Tony’s contributions and share his cultural legacy.”

“CPB is pleased to support this program, celebrating and sharing with all Americans Tony Bennett’s enduring musical legacy,” said Patricia Harrison, president and CEO of the Corporation for Public Broadcasting. “Broadcast of the Gershwin Prize is part of public media’s mission to provide high-quality content that educates, informs, engages, and inspires audiences of all generations.”

“Tony Bennett is one of the most accomplished and beloved artists of our time,” said Librarian of Congress Carla Hayden. “His staying power is a testament to the enduring appeal of the Great American Songbook the Gershwins helped write, and his ability to collaborate with new generations of music icons has been a gift to music lovers of all ages.”

No one in American popular music has recorded for so long and at such a high level of excellence as Tony Bennett. His initial successes came via a string of Columbia singles in the early 1950s, including such chart-toppers as “Because of You,” “Rags to Riches” and a remake of Hank Williams’ “Cold, Cold Heart.” He has had 24 songs in the Top 40, including “I Wanna Be Around,” “The Good Life,” “Who Can I Turn To (When Nobody Needs Me)” and his signature song, “I Left My Heart in San Francisco,” which garnered two GRAMMY Awards.

In the last 10 years alone, Bennett has sold 10 million records. He has received 19 GRAMMY Awards, including a 2001 Lifetime Achievement Award and a 1995 GRAMMY for Album of the Year for his MTV Unplugged, which introduced him to a whole new generation. Later, his 2006 Duets: An American Classic was released, featuring performances with Sir Paul McCartney, Elton John, Bono and others, winning three GRAMMY Awards and going on to be one of the best-selling CDs of the year and of Bennett’s career. The follow-up, the 2011 Duets II, debuted at No. 1 on the Billboard album charts, making Bennett the oldest artist — at the age of 85 — to achieve this in the history of recorded music. He broke this record three years later with his 2014 collaboration with Lady Gaga, Tony Bennett & Lady Gaga: Cheek to Cheek, which also debuted at No. 1 when he was 88.

Bennett was born in 1926 in Queens, New York. His father died when he was 10 years old and his mother, Anna, raised Tony and his older brother and sister, John and Mary. Bennett attended the High School of Industrial Arts in Manhattan, where he nurtured his two passions, singing and painting. From the radio, he developed a love of music listening to Bing Crosby, Louis Armstrong and James Durante. Bennett is also a World War II veteran who fought in the Battle of the Bulge and participated in the liberation of a concentration camp. He marched with Martin Luther King, Jr. in Selma to support civil rights. He has performed for 11 U.S. presidents. The United Nations has named him a Citizen of the World as one of its foremost ambassadors. Among his honors, Bennett has been a Kennedy Center honoree (2005), an NEA Jazz Master (2006), and received Billboard magazine’s Century Award (2006).

“Tony Bennett: The Library of Congress Gershwin Prize for Popular Song” is a co-production of WETA Washington, D.C., Bounce AEG and The Library of Congress. The executive producers are Dalton Delan, Carla Hayden and Michael Strunsky. The producers are Bounce’s Tim Swift, Kristi Foley and, for the Library of Congress, Susan H. Vita. The director is Leon Knoles. The music director is Gregg Field. “Tony Bennett: The Library of Congress Gershwin Prize for Popular Song” is made possible through the generous support of the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, PBS, and public television viewers. Funding is also provided by The James Madison Council of the Library of Congress, The Ira and Leonore Gershwin Fund, and The Leonore S. Gershwin Trust for the benefit of The Library of Congress Trust Fund Board. Air transportation is provided by United Airlines.

For more information about “Tony Bennett: The Library of Congress Gershwin Prize for Popular Song,” visit www.pbs.org/Gershwin-Prize. An electronic press kit, including downloadable talent photos for promotional use, is available at www.pressroom.pbs.org. To follow “The Library of Congress Gershwin Prize for Popular Song” on Twitter, use hashtag #PBSGershwin. More information on the Library of Congress Gershwin Prize for Popular Song can also be found at www.loc.gov/about/awards-and-honors/gershwin-prize/.

]]>Thu, 02 Nov 2017 19:33:00 +0000How Wynton Marsalis is like Mozart - and why his concerto in Philly is for violin, not trumpethttp://wyntonmarsalis.org/news/entry/how-wynton-marsalis-is-like-mozart-concerto-for-violin-not-trumpet
wynton_news_16823Supposedly running 50 minutes at its 2015 London premiere, the concerto would seem to be one of the longest pieces of its kind. Now that it’s arriving for Philadelphia Orchestra concerts Thursday through Saturday at the Kimmel Center, the piece has a more Brahmsian length of 40 minutes. Rest assured, though, this concerto doesn’t sound like Brahms.

“It’s always about finding the sound of something vernacular. I love our music. I don’t feel like I need to imitate German composers at all,” said the 56-year-old Marsalis, the multi-Grammy-winning jazz trumpeter. “I went around for years with Schoenberg’s Theory of Harmony under my arm, but I never felt that was the conclusion of American music.”

That still doesn’t explain how the piece turned into such a whirlwind, or, in the words of Los Angeles music critic Laurie Niles, “a storm that may need more taming.”

Even though Marsalis says he only revised five minutes out of the piece, that’s still a fair amount of concerto real estate. The essence of the piece remains, said celebrated Scottish violinist Nicola Benedetti, who will be the Philadelphia Orchestra’s soloist in her subscription debut. The exception is her cadenzas, which had “several pretty major overhauls,” she said in an email. She knows: The piece was written for her.

“I worked with Nicky quite a lot,” said Marsalis. “I love writing for people. I’ll stay up day and night. I love making it better. I love having an advocate like her. … All of the psychological complexity of the work comes from her … whether a spiritual church feel, a blues sensibility, or something based on a dream.”

The New Orleans-born Marsalis is best known for jazz, including his current position as artistic director of Jazz at Lincoln Center. But he has been writing concert works since the late 1990s, most notably the Pulitzer Prize-winning Blood on the Fields.

The Violin Concerto is a series of dramatically different episodes. One movement is subtitled “Rondo burlesque” (a term Mahler used), and another is dubbed “Hootenanny.” They demanded more detailed musical information than he thought. In one phrase, he asks to “collapse in a sigh, a sigh like somebody who just died.”

Marsalis also resisted ending with a bang. Instead, the piece seems to amble off into the horizon, like some storytelling bard leaving you to think about what you’ve heard.

The whole package, “redefines what American music is in the 21st century … ,” said the orchestra’s conductor-in-residence Cristian Macelaru in an email. “On first hearing, the piece can seem episodic, but the true genius … lies beneath the surface where everything is interconnected and interwoven.”

“Every twist and turn, harmony, rhythm, texture, melody … is all so deeply intrinsic to the rest,” said Benedetti. “Pieces that are instantly so relatable and fun don’t always deepen and develop in your heart and mind the more you study them … but the opposite is true of this piece.”

“A new form, to be sure,” said Macelaru. “Nothing is forced, expectations are built, ideas are fully developed. …”

And at this point, the piece is seasoned enough that there’s a possibility of a commercial recording to be made from the Kimmel Center performances.

Marsalis began writing concert works with the encouragement of the severe German conductor Kurt Masur, New York Philharmonic director from 1991-2002. When they ran into each other at Lincoln Center, Masur appealed to Marsalis’ social conscience: “He understood the line between civilization and barbarism, and we have to always nurture common ground,” said Marsalis.

Anyone with historic perspective realizes that Marsalis is not so much of a departure from composers of centuries past. Mozart, Beethoven, and Chopin, to name a few, were virtuoso improvisers like him. Chopin’s written compositions are said to have been a pale shadow next to his improvisations.

Like Mozart (and many current classical composers), Marsalis has no problem working out his thoughts in his head, particularly during those long automobile drives between gigs. Unlike Chopin, there’s no agony in writing his thoughts down. He does it longhand — without using the popular computer software. “My house is full of notebooks. I compose in my head. I compose in the car. I use piano … which is great for getting work done,” he says. “The hardest thing to figure out is the `bottom’ of the orchestra” — similar to a bass line in jazz.

He’s not the only one. Many classical composers resort to what might be called “Mission Impossible Theme” rhythms. Marsalis’ weakness is vamps — those pithy introductory ideas that can be repeated until you’re ready to go on to something else.

“When I wrote All Rise in 1999 for the New York Philharmonic, John Lewis [founder of the Modern Jazz Quartet] said, ‘Too many vamps,’ ” Marsalis recalls. “It became a joke between us. I saw him a few days before he died [in 2001]. He was very very sick, and when I was walking out of the room he said, ‘Work on your bass motion.’ You can’t write vamps for everything.”

What’s truly missing from his concert output is a trumpet concerto. As one of the best-known trumpeters in the world, how could he not write one? Suddenly a nerve has been hit. “I’m never going to do that,” says Marsalis is a steely tone of voice.

But … but … Mozart wrote many concertos for himself.

Marsalis dug in his heels: “He was Mozart.”

Marsalis and The Planets

The Wynton Marsalis Violin Concerto will be performed by the Philadelphia Orchestra with Gustav Holst’s The Planets Thursday through Saturday at the Kimmel Center, 300 S. Broad St.

Marsalis with President Drew Faust before the event. Jon Chase/Harvard Staff Photographer

“In a few minutes, we are going to talk about improvisation. You are about to see it,” Harvard President Drew Faust told the crowd at Sanders Theatre on Monday evening as jazz great Wynton Marsalis took up his trumpet.

The acclaimed musician, bandleader, composer, and instructor didn’t disappoint, jamming with members of the Harvard jazz community in an impromptu rendition of Charlie Parker’s “Now’s the Time.” The crowd roared in joy.

The performance preceded Marsalis’ conversation with Faust about music and creativity that also celebrated the release of Music as Metaphor a video version now on the Harvard YouTube channel of the appearance that launched his lecture and performance series at the University in 2011. The eventual six-part program grew out of Faust’s commitment to incorporating the arts more fully into campus life, in part by bringing more performers and artists to Cambridge to engage the community directly.

Beginning in 2011 and over the next three years, Marsalis made six visits to campus for wide-ranging forays into history and culture, viewed through a musical lens. He punctuated his talks with pulsing performances that helped illustrate America’s eclectic musical heritage, the embrace of improvisation, the roots of jazz in New Orleans, the history of orchestral jazz, the relationship between American music and social dance, and song styles in popular music.

On Monday, Faust returned to a number of themes Marsalis had touched on during his lectures, including the role of improvisation. Listening and developing a “constant dialogue” is key to improvising, said Marsalis, who is managing and artistic director of Jazz at Lincoln Center.

“You are constantly reassessing where you are. It’s a challenge.”

Listening to each other is key not only in music, but in life, said Marsalis, who lamented the lack of connection he sees today between those who are more interested in their cellphones and earphones than in each other.

“We are lost in a certain way,” said Marsalis, “and we need to assess and find our way and be for real about who we want to be.”

Even with his years of experience, numerous recordings, and awards, Marsalis said he is still learning. He often takes cues from younger performers he has taught who have called him out for addressing them as if they were still high schoolers instead of accomplished musicians.

“I said, ‘Hey, I am so used to doing it, I am going to try and change it, but what you have to do is call me on it.’ And I think just like that, a year and a half or two years of them calling me on it all the time, it was educational.

“If you are going to lead, you have to lead. But you also have to learn.”

The meaning of music is profound for Marsalis. While he was able to play all of the notes from an early age, he said it took him years of practicing and studying the history of musical styles and genres and listening to great artists to grasp what it means to soar beyond the notes on the page. Understanding the music, he said, means being able to “reveal to someone how you actually feel about something.”

“The meaning is what you can perceive of the value of — the kernel, the essence of — the thing and how it relates to all of us … and if you can draw that thread then you can begin to touch people.”

The son of the renowned jazz pianist Ellis Marsalis, who at age 82 still performs on Fridays at Snug Harbor in New Orleans, Wynton showed a gift for the trumpet early. At 14 he played with the New Orleans Philharmonic. He later attended Juilliard. He performed with jazz legends and assembled a band, signed recording contracts, and eventually won honors, including nine Grammy Awards. At the same time, his commitment to jazz developed in tandem with his devotion to classical music. He has performed with leading orchestras around the world and won Grammys for Best Classical Soloist with an Orchestra in 1983 and 1984. He also won the Pulitzer Prize for music in 1997 for “Jazz on the Fields,” a complex jazz oratorio.

In keeping with Marsalis’ tradition of blending discourse with performance, members of the Harvard jazz community, led by Yosvany Terry, senior lecturer on music and director of jazz ensembles, performed a selection of works before the talk.

The event also helped to mark the 10-year anniversary of Faust’s call to create a University-wide arts task force. The chair of that committee, Stephen Greenblatt, Cogan University Professor of the Humanities, introduced the performance and discussion and said the task force had embraced making the arts an “integral part of the cognitive life of the University.” In the decade since, in addition to bringing a wider range of artists to campus, Harvard has introduced curricular developments in arts practice, including an undergraduate track in architecture and the Theater, Dance & Media concentration, a number of January arts intensives, and a masters’ program at the Graduate School of Design in Art, Design, and the Public Domain.

Greenblatt called Marsalis “one of the most intellectually exuberant and generous of the great artists who have contributed so much in recent years to Harvard,” and thanked Faust for her vision for the arts and for bringing Marsalis to campus.

With his series, Marsalis offered the Harvard community not only a history of the country and culture though music, but also a “way to resistance,” said Jorie Graham, Boylston Professor of Oratory and Rhetoric, during her opening remarks.

“I mean the resistance to everything that would dehumanize us, make us deaf, or unwilling to trust our bodies’ gut-take on, yes, the truth.”

She thanked Marsalis for “not only teaching us, but showing us how to teach.”

“As the poet [Philip] Larkin said of Sidney Bechet [a founding New Orleans jazz musician], ‘On me your music falls as they say love falls, like an enormous yes, and it is greeted as the natural noise of the good.’”

]]>Tue, 31 Oct 2017 10:05:00 +0000With Faust, Wynton Marsalis Reflects on Power of Musichttp://wyntonmarsalis.org/news/entry/with-faust-wynton-marsalis-reflects-on-power-of-music
wynton_news_16815Trumpeter and composer Wynton L. Marsalis improvised some blues with the Harvard Jazz Band before reflecting on the value of education for both the arts and society with University President Drew G. Faust in a crowded Sanders Theatre Monday night.

Marsalis was celebrating the video release of Music as Metaphor, the first in a series of six combined lectures and performances he gave at Harvard between 2011 and 2014. The world-renowned artist has won nine Grammy Awards for both his jazz and classical performances.

English professors Stephen J. Greenblatt and Jorie Graham introduced the event with praise of music education and its advocates, specifically mentioning Faust and Marsalis.

Greenblatt welcomed Marsalis as “one of the most intellectually exuberant and generous of the great artists who has contributed so much in recent years to Harvard.”

Following their comments, Yosvany Terry, a Music lecturer and Jazz Ensembles director, brought up six undergraduates to play for the audience and then joined in himself, beating a drum and singing along to a traditional West African song.

Marsalis then took the stage, greeted the members of the Jazz Band with hugs, and surprised the audience by taking out his own trumpet to accompany trumpeter Miranda Agnew ’21 in improvisational blues.

Beginning their conversation, Faust recapped Marsalis’s previous appearances at Harvard then asked questions about the value of music and education.

“The value of education and of knowledge is that you become aware of things and ways you can become more powerful,” Marsalis said.

Throughout the event, Faust played clips from videos of Marsalis’s previous lectures.

“There are essences in our music that testify to a single national identity and it took generations of struggles to bind them,” Marsalis said in one clip. “Meaning is the essence of the art, and art is the essence of the people.”

Marsalis also talked about the impact of technology in education and society, and noted its effects on the music industry.

“A lot of people aren’t even playing; they’ve all got earplugs in,” he said. “They’re musicians. What do you need earplugs for if you’re a musician? You need to hear. Then they hire people to fake like they’re playing.”

At the beginning of his talk, Marsalis joked that he would never get a job at Harvard. After thanking him for his contributions over the years, Faust joked in kind and said, “you’re hired.”

Marsalis has won awards including the National Humanities Medal, the National Medal of the Arts, membership in the British Royal Academy of Music, and membership in the French Legion of Honor. Harvard awarded him an honorary doctorate for his contributions to the field of music in 2009.

The Maria Schneider Orchestra was voted the top Big Band, and its leader took home the honors for top Composer and Arranger.

The winner for Historical Album is the Bill Evans Trio’s On A Monday Evening (Fantasy), documenting performances in Madison, Wisconsin, on Nov. 15, 1976.

The readers’ choice for top Blues Album is TajMo (Concord), a collaboration between revered blues veterans Taj Mahal and Keb’ Mo’.

Guitarist Jeff Beck topped the Beyond Artist or Group category, and the Beyond Album honors went to You Want It Darker (Columbia), the final album by singer-songwriter Leonard Cohen, who passed away Nov. 7, 2016.

“The results of this year’s Readers Poll are an indication of the incredible variety and depth of talent on the jazz scene today,” said DownBeat Editor Bobby Reed. “Wynton Marsalis’ induction into the DownBeat Hall of Fame is a reminder that he is not only a remarkable composer and bandleader, but also one of the most skillful musicians to ever pick up a trumpet. With his induction into the Hall of Fame, he joins timeless luminaries such as Louis Armstrong, John Coltrane, Miles Davis, Duke Ellington, Ella Fitzgerald, Dizzy Gillespie and Billie Holiday.”

The December issue of DownBeat contains the complete results in all 34 Readers Poll categories.

Additionally, the issue includes features on numerous poll winners, including Marsalis, Corea, Krall, Snarky Puppy, and Taj Mahal and Keb’ Mo’, as well as Christian McBride, who won the Bass category.

Fans will have opportunities to see many of these groundbreaking artists on tour in the coming weeks. Marsalis and the Jazz at Lincoln Center Orchestra will embark on a Big Band Holidays tour, which begins on Nov. 30 in Richmond, Virginia, and later makes stops in South Carolina, Florida, Georgia and North Carolina. The band will enjoy a residency at Jazz at Lincoln Center’s Rose Theater on Dec. 13–17. For more info, visit Marsalis’ website.

The Chick Corea/Steve Gadd Band will begin a European tour on Nov. 2 with a show in Stuttgart, Germany. The band will play subsequent concerts in other countries, including Italy, Spain, Switzerland, France and Austria. For more info, visit Corea’s website.

Krall will tour Canada in the coming weeks, beginning with a Nov. 21 show in Quebec City, followed by 11 more concerts, culminating in a Dec. 8 performance in Vancouver. For more info, visit Krall’s website.

]]>Tue, 24 Oct 2017 08:24:00 +0000Violin star Nicola Benedetti elated to do concerto by jazz great Wynton Marsalishttp://wyntonmarsalis.org/news/entry/violin-star-nicola-benedetti-elated-to-do-concerto-by-jazz-great-wynton-mar
wynton_news_16808As one of the world’s most acclaimed young violinists, Nicola Benedetti has earned a stellar reputation for her ability to perform some of the most challenging works in classical music with flawless technical mastery and deep emotional conviction.

So what did this Scottish-born virtuoso tell jazz legend Wynton Marsalis after he sent her the first page of the violin concerto he had composed especially for her?

“He was relieved that somebody had responded like that. He’s used to having the opposite happen — that everyone tells him what he wrote is too complicated and will take too long to rehearse.”

As reference, Benedetti sent him scores to violin concertos by Beethoven, Shostakovich, Stravinsky and some of her other favorite composers. At her request, Marsalis happily and extensively reworked his Concerto in D Major before she debuted it in 2015 at concerts in Europe and last year in North America, including at the Hollywood Bowl and at the Ravinia festival in Chicago.

In his notes about the concerto, which draws from jazz, blues and Scottish reels, Marsalis points out some musical characteristics he and Benedetti share.

“Because Anglo-Celtic mythology, process, dance and music are all up in the roots of most forms of American folk expression, Nicky and I were able to mine our natural ancestry and mutual heritage,” Marsalis writes.

“She gave me a first-class course on violin.”

Violin star Nicola Benedetti has been singled out for praise by Wynton Marsalis, her Pulitzer Prize-winning musical collaborator. ((Photo by Simon Fowler))

Benedetti will perform the concerto Friday and Sunday with the San Diego Symphony and guest conductor Cristian Măcelaru. The Jacobs Masterworks concert, which is billed as “Romance, Mystery, Marsalis,” will also feature Suite No. 1 from Bizet’s Carmen and Rimsky-Korsakov’s Scheherazade, Op. 35.

A tantalizing gourmet feast of various Americana music styles and classical, the concerto’s four movements are titled “Rhapsody,” “Rondo Burlesque,” “Blues” and “Hootenanny.”

They are a showcase for Pulitzer Prize-winning composer Marsalis’ love of vernacular American music. In turn, his concerto provides Benedetti with a stunning vehicle for her ballet-like ability to dance across the strings, her exceptional execution, and her skill at performing with pinpoint articulation at even the most accelerated tempos.

“It has evolved a lot,” she said of the 2-year-old concerto, speaking by phone last week from London. “The cadenza is almost entirely changed. I don’t think there’s a single note in it now that I played at the world premiere in London. But that’s always been the case — Wynton has rewritten the cadenza for almost every single performance.

“The piece itself hasn’t changed in structure or length all that much. But the clarity of the parts, in terms of specific guidance and directions — and the balance of orchestration — is always what you have to be quite careful about.”

Benedetti laughed.

“It didn’t seem t matter how much I mentioned that to Wynton,” she recalled. “He only believed it when he heard it for himself.”

She laughed again.

“I think the solo instrumental profession is quite an extreme version of a discipline,” Benedetti said. “By that, I mean most of the music we play — if not all of it — is music that, by necessity, you have put in a lot of hours just to get the virtuosic tempo and to have that element of magic you’re looking for onstage.

“That takes a lot of time and input. What I was trying to explain to Wynton is that I sound better playing something I find really hard to begin with, and that I have to go through hell to learn. Because that’s where my comfort level lies.”

Jazz trumpet great Wynton Marsalis first heard Nicola Benedetti perform when she was just 17. ((Photo by Bob Burgess/AP))

Marsalis was only 18 when he joined Art Blakey’s fabled band, The Jazz Messengers, in 1980. Within a few years, he was a jazz star and band leader in his own right.

In 1983, the audacious young trumpeter became the first artist ever to win Grammy Awards for both jazz and classical albums — a feat he repeated the following year.

In 1997, he won the Pulitzer Prize for Music for his ambitious oratorio, “Blood on the Fields.” In 2009, the French government presented him with the Legion of Honor, that country’s highest honor.

Given his stature, did Benedetti hesitate to tell Marsalis to start re-writing his concerto for her?

“I wouldn’t say I was hesitant. I know him well and have known him for a long time,” she said, before pausing to reconsider the question.

“I don’t know. Perhaps I was a little hesitant. I kind of learned during the process. It’s a delicate thing when somebody is writing something incredibly personal for you to play. And you want to say things that are perceived as you would like them to be, because it’s kind of dangerous mixing words and (musical) notes.

“There’s a lot of intelligent conversation that can go on. What someone is playing has such definitive power… On the other hand, my hesitancy to tell Wynton anything wasn’t because I feared his reaction, but because I feared how seriously he would take what I’d say. I’d make a momentary comment and — the next thing I knew — he rewritten a complete passage! So, seeing that happen a couple of times, I was fairly considered and waited longer before tellling him anything.”

Benedetti was just 17 when she met and performed for Marsalis at New York’s Lincoln Center, where her audience also included two other legends — soprano Kathleen Battle and fellow violinist Itzhak Perlman.

“It was quite an overwhelming night!” she recalled. “I was extremely nervous, not least because Itzhak was sitting right in front of me!

“The whole evening was filled with so many (famous) names and grandeur that, even at this age, I would be overwhelmed by it. I probably took it more in stride then than I would now.”

Before befriending Marsalis, the then-teen-aged Benedetti was a fan of French violin great Stéphane Grappelli and Canadian jazz piano giant Oscar Peterson.

Did the trumpeter introduce her to the music of such American jazz violin greats as Stuff Smith, Joe Venutti and Ray Nance?

“All of those violinists,” Benedetti replied. “It was nothing enforced by Wynton, but he encouraged me to listen to such a huge diversity of music. Some of it seemed directly related (to the concerto) and some less so. He would share things with me, out of interest and intrigue, that he loved the sound of.”

Nicola Benedetti strives to find the essence of each piece of music she performs, not matter the style. ((Photo by Simon Fowler))

“It’s a difficult balance to strike,” Benedetti stressed. “On the one hand, you want to bring to life the extremely varied, and sometimes otherworldly, story of the concerto. On the other hand, you don’t want to caricature styles that are not your own. So my natural disposition is (to be) extremely cautious.

“At first, I’m very conservative (with new music). Then, with time, I start to explore a little more and be a bit more experimental. Even then, I’m loathe to sound like I’m imitating something else. So I’d say it’s a delicate process.”

Up until the dawn of the 20th century, classical musicians knew how to improvise and were called upon to do so during concert performances.

Then, almost as if a giant magic wand had been waved, improvisation became a lost art in classical music. Some observers dispute this, but Benedetti is most assuredly not one of them.

“It’s not an arguable concept, at all. It’s pretty much fact,” she lamented.

“Beethoven was more interested in improvising with his students than teaching them composition or playing his own compositions with them. He’d improvise an enormously high number of his performances and it was such a common practice that you can’t consider him without that component…

“Now, these are separate categories. Then again, only now do we have the centuries of classical repertoire written for violin that you’re expected to learn and know. So I try to know as much as I can about the variety of directions that instrumental music has gone in. But I basically end up more and more confused, the more I know… You have to interact with the music with the utmost integrity you can find for yourself.”

On her 2013 album, “Homecoming — A Scottish Fantasy,” Benedetti teamed with top Celtic music artists Aly Bain and Phil Cunningham for a collection of Scottish orchestral music, airs, laments and reels.

Was she comfortable during the improvisational sections she played with Bain and Cunningham?

“No, not at all!” replied Benedetii, who this summer became the youngest recipient ever of Queen Elizabeth’s prestigious Medal for Music.

“What can I say? I generally felt very uncomfortable — not with Aly and Phil — but with my own playing of their music. I just feel like I was constantly not quite making the mark. But it was a fascinating experience and very much in the spirit of collaboration.”

In that same spirit of collaboration, have she and Marsalis ever performed together?

Benedetti laughed heartily.

“No,” she said. “But next time you speak to him, tell him he should really consider it!”

]]>Tue, 24 Oct 2017 08:20:00 +0000Wynton Marsalis makes a return engagementhttp://wyntonmarsalis.org/news/entry/wynton-marsalis-makes-a-return-engagement
wynton_news_16791Wynton Marsalis returns to campus Oct. 30 for an evening celebrating the video release of “Music as Metaphor,” the lecture and performance that launched his Harvard lecture series in 2011. The event, “A Conversation with Wynton Marsalis and Drew Faust,” will explore the importance of the arts and cultural literacy in education, jazz, and society.

“Wynton Marsalis is a dynamic performer and an exceptional teacher,” said Faust, Harvard’s president. “His lectures and performances at Harvard have illuminated for our community the many ways in which the arts are fundamental to learning and understanding more about ourselves and the world around us. I am honored to welcome back a friend of Harvard for what I’m sure will be an engaging and educational evening.”

Faust and Marsalis will be joined at Sanders Theatre by Boylston Professor of Oratory and Rhetoric Jorie Graham, Cogan University Professor Stephen Greenblatt, visiting senior lecturer on music and Director of Jazz Ensembles Yosvany Terry, and members of the Harvard jazz community.

“Cultural literacy is an essential component of the liberal arts education,” said Marsalis. “It is my hope that making this lecture more widely accessible will further encourage educators to embrace the centrality of the arts in the learning process.”

Marsalis’ lecture series, “Hidden in Plain View: Meanings in American Music,” was sponsored by the Office of the President and Provost. The series launched in April 2011 before a capacity crowd with “Music as Metaphor,” an interpretation of the many unobserved symbols in American music and their illumination of the democratic process. It features performances by Marsalis alongside Walter Blanding, James Chirillo, Carlos Henriquez, Ali Jackson, Dan Nimmer, and Mark O’Connor. The series continued in September 2011 with the second lecture, “The Double Crossing of a Pair of Heels: The Dynamics of Social Dance and American Popular Musics,” which featured four dancing couples in a diversity of styles. The lecture addressed the cultural significance of changes in American social dance from the jig to the cakewalk, the turkey trot to the mambo, and the lindy hop and the twist.

His third lecture, “Meet Me at the Crossroad,” in February 2012, examined the integrated roots of rock ’n’ roll, while his fourth, in April 2013, “At the Speed of Instinct: Choosing Together to Play and Stay Together,” demonstrated the complexity of the spur-of-the-moment choices that define jazz improvisation. Marsalis returned to campus in September 2013 for “Setting the Communal Table: The Evolution of the Jazz Orchestra,” a lecture on the history of orchestral jazz featuring the Jazz at Lincoln Center Orchestra. He concluded the six-lecture and performance series at Sanders Theatre in 2014 with “New Orleans: The Birth of Jazz.”

In addition to his lectures, Marsalis engaged in dialogue with students throughout the University and community, taught master classes at a local high school, participated in a panel discussion about education and the arts at Harvard Graduate School of Education, and spoke at the Harvard Innovation Labs about the artist as an entrepreneur.

Marsalis is an internationally acclaimed musician, composer, and bandleader, an educator, and a leading advocate of American culture. A native of New Orleans, he is one of the nation’s most highly decorated cultural figures. In addition to winning nine Grammy Awards, he was the first jazz musician to receive the Pulitzer Prize for Music for his oratorio “Blood on the Fields.” Marsalis has received both the National Humanities Medal and the National Medal of the Arts, the highest awards given to artists by the U.S. government. He was awarded an honorary doctorate in music by Harvard University in 2009.

His international accolades include honorary membership in Britain’s Royal Academy of Music, the highest decoration for someone not a British citizen, and the insignia of the Chevalier of the Legion of Honor, France’s highest distinction.

Marsalis is one of the most prolific and inventive composers of his generation, having created an expansive range of music for everything from jazz quartets to big bands, chamber music ensembles to symphony orchestras. He has written for tap, ballet, and modern dance, and collaborated with an unprecedented range of artists, from Willie Nelson (Texas) to Igor Butman (Russia) to Chano Dominguez’s Flamenco Art Ensemble (Spain), Yacub Addy and Odadaa! (Ghana), and the Sachal Jazz Ensemble (Pakistan).

He has recorded 99 albums and has more than 450 compositions to his credit. Marsalis has also written and produced a Peabody Award-winning radio and television series and an Emmy-winning short feature for Super Bowl XLVII.

Tickets for the event at Sanders Theatre are free. They will become available for the Harvard community on Tuesday and for the public on Wednesday. For information on obtaining tickets, visit the Harvard Box Office website

]]>Mon, 16 Oct 2017 16:18:00 +0000Having Fun and Learning Straight from the Mastershttp://wyntonmarsalis.org/news/entry/having-fun-and-learning-straight-from-the-masters
wynton_news_16790When Wynton Marsalis and the Jazz at Lincoln Center Orchestra come to the Symphony Center, you make a point to see them. They are dynamic and masters at their craft. If your kids are uninterested and don’t want to attend a jazz show, don’t worry. Wynton Marsalis and The Jazz at Lincoln Center Orchestra have something to bridge the gap.

The Jazz at Lincoln Center Orchestra, led by Marsalis, performed a Jazz for Young People show on Saturday morning to inspire children of all ages to learn about the jazz world. The show was half classroom instruction (with Marsalis playing the part of professor) and half a foot-tapping, swinging good time. With their incredible dedication and enthusiasm for jazz, Marsalis and his orchestra told the story of jazz legend Count Basie, making his life and his influences easy to understand to the young people in the audience while also having a fun time.

Marsalis recounted the stories from Basie’s lifetime; how he went from sweeping the floors to becoming a legend. Along the way there were life lessons including “if you have a job, always show up so nobody can take your job” and “If you are nice to people, people will be nice to you.” Definitely good things for children to hear.

But there were more than just life lessons, Jazz for Young People was also a pretty in depth musical lesson too. Marsalis used stories from Basie’s life to explain the difference, with the help of the rhythm section, between the Kansas City stomp style and the sounds that Basie would adapt with this “All-American Rhythm Section.”

Each time Marsalis made a musical point, he turned to the orchestra to demonstrate that point. And when the band started playing the lesson really came to life. For example, Marsalis explained that Basie was the first to use two tenor saxophone players at the time, whereas most bands of the time had just one. Basie, Marsalis explained, placed each of the saxophones on either side of the stage, and soon had the tenor players engaged in “duels,” at which point the band kicked up and Victor Goines and Walter Blanding took turns battling each other with their horns to the delight of the audience.

Marsalis also gave a lesson on improvising using “riffs.” Marsalis explained that a riff can be anything that repeats itself over and over again, like parents saying, “eat your vegetables, eat your vegetables” or “brush your teeth, brush your teeth.” And then he had the band demonstrate. The trumpets repeated a riff, the saxophones repeated a different riff and the trombones used a third riff to show how they could all bring it together into a beautiful jazz song. Which the audience went bonkers for.

Jazz for Young People show was so jam packed with information that even the adults in the audience learned a thing or two. Plus, the parents in attendance had to be awed that their children were getting a music lesson by the greats of the day: The Jazz at the Lincoln Center Orchestra and Wynton Marsalis – a Grammy and a Pulitzer prize winner. Having fun and learning lessons straight from the masters, well, there is no better way to learn.

Let no one doubt that Wynton Marsalis and the Jazz at Lincoln Center Orchestra aim to educate as well as entertain.

That much was inescapable from their residency over the weekend in Orchestra Hall, where Marsalis and friends kicked off Symphony Center’s jazz series with rigorous examinations of the work of two jazz giants.

Surely no performance ensemble has done more to champion music of the first jazz composer — Jelly Roll Morton — than JLCO.

On Friday evening, the ensemble reiterated the point with a program featuring Morton’s music, plus original compositions by JLCO personnel. In effect, the evening spanned the history of jazz composition, from groundbreaking works by Morton — the first to prove that jazz could be written down — to contemporary pieces that would not have been possible without Morton’s breakthroughs.

Marsalis and the orchestra opened with Morton’s “Sidewalk Blues,” a landmark not only for the ingenuity of the composition but also for Morton’s innovative recording of it, complete with spoken word and honking car horns. JLCO alto saxophonist Sherman Irby’s arrangement celebrated the ensemble’s signature robust sound, punctuated by a lusty, plunger-muted trumpet solo from Marsalis.

From this early Morton work, the band leaped ahead to the last, tragic years of the composer’s career. Mostly forgotten by a jazz world he helped invent, Morton composed big-band compositions embracing the swing aesthetic of the late 1930s, but also personalizing it. These last works rarely are performed, but JLCO’s rendition of “Mr. Joe” illuminated why they need to be. The sleekness of Morton’s orchestral writing, the poetry of his themes and the idiosyncrasies of his phrasing show that the man had not run out of ideas, even if the music industry had lost interest in him.

The JLCO’s tonal luster and naturalness of expression suggested that the band should consider making an album of all Morton’s late-period orchestral scores. It could deepen our understanding of Morton’s final years (he died in 1941).

Bassist Carlos Henriquez’s radical re-conception of Morton’s “The Crave” doubled down on Morton’s love of what he called “the Spanish tinge.” This brilliant arrangement included vast sections of dance music, thrilling passages featuring cascading horns and a surging rhythmic energy that held it all together.

Trombonist Chris Crenshaw’s arrangement of “Jelly Roll Blues,” the first published jazz composition (1915), epitomized period style and amplified it, thanks to clarinetist Victor Goines’ trills and other ornate figurations and a high-flying solo from trumpeter Kenny Rampton.

And the fourth movement of Sonny Rollins’ “Freedom Suite,” as arranged by Walter Blanding, cast a spotlight on the band’s throaty reeds and testifying brass. Goines’ blues lament on tenor saxophone was a high point of the evening.

On this program, though, all roads led back to Morton. Among the other highlights: Ted Nash’s exquisitely complex reinvention of Morton’s “Black Bottom Stomp” and Goines’ sensitivity to Crescent City rhythms in his arrangement of Morton’s “New Orleans Blues.” Both reminded listeners of the stature of Morton’s art.

On Saturday evening, the musicians turned their attention to a more recent master, John Lewis. Though best known as pianist and musical director for the Modern Jazz Quartet, Lewis (who died in 2001) was a subtle jazz composer with a singular vision. The elegance, understatement and profundity we associate with his pianism, in other words, radiate from his scores for small and large ensemble.

Jon Batiste, bandleader for “The Late Show with Stephen Colbert,” appeared with Marsalis and JLCO on the recent album “The Music of John Lewis,” and that repertoire dominated this concert.

The buoyant swing sensibility of Lewis’ “Animal Dance” showed his gift for conjuring propulsive rhythmic momentum in a large ensemble; the intricate counterpoint that trombonist Elliot Mason, trumpeter Marcus Printup and alto saxophonist Nash articulated in Lewis’ “Delaunay’s Dilemma” illustrated the composer’s finesse with the intimacies of small-group improvisation.

Lewis’ quasi-classical writing in his suite “The Comedy,” inspired by Italian commedia dell’arte, attested to the man’s erudition, as well as his ability to imbue practically any musical idiom with a compelling jazz aesthetic.

Part of the completely disarming charm of this 15-piece big band is the fun they appear to be having.

It is a lesson in old-school class. The musicians warm up backstage and stroll casually to their chairs, wearing matching suits and shoes, to play a program that includes standards as well as compositions and arrangements written by band members.

If that sounds a bit Ellington-esque, it’s meant to. Marsalis explained that the band is continuing the legacy of Duke Ellington, adding that several of its founding members had been members of the original Ellington band.

This group plays with energy, style, extreme polish, a decided sense of fun, and obvious, clearly stated respect for each other, the musicians who came before them, and the young players coming up now.

Their section playing often sounds like one gorgeous, full voice that somehow manages to divide into beautifully blended and balanced harmonies.

When they take turns at solos — and everyone in the band takes multiple solos — it becomes apparent that each one of them has has own sound and musical style, and that each one is well-worth hearing multiple times.

Marsalis keeps a distinctly low profile on the stage, “fronting” the band from his seat in the trumpet section. He speaks about the tunes on the program, colleagues in the band (present and former), and some of the powerful history of the music they play.

Marsalis takes some wonderful solos as a member of the band. He and his fellow band members listen to their colleagues’ solos, some short and some extended, while nodding, grinning and occasionally calling out in support and appreciation.

The Beloit Memorial High School Jazz Orchestra, under director Chris Behrens, opened the concert. The fresh-faced ensemble, which has participated in the Jazz at Lincoln Center Essentially Ellington program six timers, delivered two stylish, well-played tunes for an appreciative audience.

]]>Thu, 12 Oct 2017 16:38:00 +0000Wynton Marsalis and Jazz at Lincoln Center celebrate 30 years of spreading the musichttp://wyntonmarsalis.org/news/entry/wynton-marsalis-and-jazz-at-lincoln-center-celebrate-30-years
wynton_news_16752When Wynton Marsalis and the Jazz at Lincoln Center Orchestra swing into Chicago next week, they won’t just be kicking off a three-concert residency in Orchestra Hall.

They’ll also be celebrating two landmark anniversaries: 25 years since the band made its Chicago debut on that same stage (in a far-reaching program celebrating the music of Duke Ellington) and 30 years since Jazz at Lincoln Center began to emerge as an institution.

What started in 1987 as a series of concerts that Marsalis spearheaded at Lincoln Center in New York has evolved into the country’s foremost institution dedicated to championing, performing and educating America about jazz.

If you doubt that, consider the figures: With an annual budget of $51.5 million, Jazz at Lincoln Center last year alone presented over 1,100 performances in its Manhattan home and on the road and produced more than 4,200 jazz education events in New York and 600 elsewhere (including Chicago).

The Jazz at Lincoln Center Orchestra, which carries the institution’s flag around the globe, performs about 100 concerts annually featuring some of the most technically demanding repertoire ever written, much of it composed or arranged by JLCO members. More than half of those performances take place on tour, with Marsalis often referring to Chicago’s Orchestra Hall as the ensemble’s “home away from home,” the band routinely packing the house.

Ultimately, Jazz at Lincoln Center dared to challenge long-accepted notions of how jazz could be presented and nurtured. If symphony orchestras, opera companies, theater institutions and the like could summon major financial support and play leading cultural roles in their communities, why couldn’t jazz? Why did jazz have to subsist primarily in tiny clubs with minimal economic underpinning?

Still, no one could have envisioned what Jazz at Lincoln Center eventually would become.

Marsalis’ attitude was, “I can dream,” he recalls.

“As we started to go, we had a dream, a vision: We could get this, we could get that. We could get into a hall. We could form an orchestra. … Let’s try this, let’s try that. Some things were really successful. Some not.”

The first challenge was creating a core ensemble — originally named the Lincoln Center Jazz Orchestra — to embody the musical values of the fledgling institution and develop the technical abilities to convey them.

“We wanted to form a big band,” remembers Marsalis, “but we hadn’t played that kind of music.”

Meaning the performance practices involved in playing landmark scores by Ellington, Jelly Roll Morton, Count Basie and other foundational jazz composers were well outside the experience of Marsalis and his young colleagues.

“That was difficult, because as younger ones, we didn’t have a tradition of playing in big bands,” he says. “We eventually developed our own sound. We had to work on that. It was very difficult to learn how to do that, to learn how to play the music.”

Learn they did, however, for today no large jazz ensemble matches the technical elan, subtlety of voicing or stylistic authenticity that JLCO brings to roughly a century’s worth of jazz writing, from vintage Morton to contemporary scores by Marsalis and other orchestra members. In effect, the band became a standard bearer of the jazz repertory, much as the Chicago Symphony Orchestra stands as an exemplar of Mahler’s orchestral works or the Berlin Philharmonic crystallizes how Beethoven and Brahms optimally sound.

Beyond that, though, JLCO stands as an orchestra of composer-arrangers. They have penned major works, such as reedist Victor Goines’ “Benny Goodman: Then, Now, Forever!” and “Crescent City,” Ted Nash’s “Portrait in Seven Shades” and “Presidential Suite” and Marsalis’ “All Rise” and Pulitzer Prize-winning “Blood on the Fields” (I served on the jury that recommended the work for the honor).

Through all this, Marsalis has made the history of jazz a central element of Jazz at Lincoln Center programming in New York and on the road, a strategy for which he has been criticized. But if Bach, Beethoven and Brahms are indispensable to understanding ongoing developments in Western classical music, why wouldn’t Ellington, Morton, Basie, Thelonious Monk and Charles Mingus be equally vital in perceiving where jazz is heading today?

To Marsalis, an embrace of jazz history — rather than ignorance of it — was essential to the institution he and his colleagues built.

They have explored what has come before “because that’s a hallmark of civilization, a hallmark of education,” he says. “It’s a hallmark of quality, it’s a hallmark of so many things that are central to development of your way of life and propagating it.”

What is the point of establishing a singular jazz institution, in other words, if it doesn’t represent the achievements of the art form and build upon them? For Jazz at Lincoln Center wasn’t going to be merely a stage for performance but an advocate for a music that never had such an institution — or anything close to an infrastructure to support it.

From the beginning, Marsalis and friends faced resistance for bringing long-ignored masterworks by Ellington and others to the fore and for declining to cater to pop-music fashions of the moment.

“When you got to play a TV show in the early years,” he remembers, “they’d say, ‘Can you play something fast? Something slow? Do you have a singer?’

“I’d always say, ‘We can just stand there and not play at all.’ ”

Marsalis and Jazz at Lincoln Center never catered to expectations set by others, instead unapologetically articulating intensely held musical values by featuring both historic works and premieres during JLCO their concerts. In addition, the institution has reached new, young constituencies through its Essentially Ellington program, which distributes scores to high schools across the country and beyond; the Essentially Ellington High School Jazz Band Competition & Festival, which draws student ensembles to New York each May; and the Let Freedom Swing educational program, which places top-notch professionals in grades K-12 (in Chicago, superb trumpeter Pharez Whitted is leading these sessions in 10 schools this year).

All of which is sorely needed at a time when America sometimes appears at war with itself.

“When our country is in the type of struggle that we’re in now for our identity, I think the music is very crucial, because the music has a lot to teach us still,” says Marsalis of jazz, a music born in the face of racial oppression.

“And we just have to hold that line. And we will.”

The Jazz at Lincoln Center Orchestra performs at 8 p.m. Oct. 13 and 14 (the latter with guest Jon Batiste); and a Jazz for Young People concert exploring “Who Is Count Basie?” at 11 a.m. Oct. 14; in Orchestra Hall at Symphony Center, 220 S. Michigan Ave.; ticket prices vary; 312-294-3000 or www.cso.org

Jazz at Lincoln Center joins the international centennial celebration honoring world-renowned educator, conductor, composer, activist and humanitarian Leonard Bernstein (1918-1990). As a composer, Bernstein united diverse musical elements at a time when it was not widely accepted, combining classical European traditions with American styles including jazz, blues, and Latin dance in iconic works including West Side Story, Candide, Wonderful Town, and On the Town. The global celebration, “Leonard Bernstein at 100,” celebrates his monumental career and legacy with over 2,000 events around the world. More information on all Bernstein events is available at leonardbernstein.com.

Jazz at Lincoln Center’s participation in the centennial celebration kicks off in Rose Theater, November 9–11, with the Jazz at Lincoln Center Orchestra with Wynton Marsalis. Grammy Award-nominated composer and arranger Richard DeRosa, whose talent is recognized from Broadway to industry-leading jazz magazines, and JLCO trombonist Vincent Gardner serve as co-music directors of the concerts. They will craft unique arrangements of Bernstein’s music from shows like West Side Story and Candide, as well as unexpected gems from Bernstein’s vast repertoire including “Lucky to Be Me,” “Touches,” and “Lonely Town.” DeRosa is currently the Director of Jazz Composition and Arranging at the University of North Texas and the Artistic Director for American Jazz Venues (AJV). Since 2012, he has conducted and arranged for the prestigious WDR Big Band in Cologne, Germany and served as the band’s chief conductor from 2014-2016.

In addition, percussionist, composer, educator and multi-Grammy Award nominee Bobby Sanabria will be at Dizzy’s Club Coca-Cola, November 17–19, leading the big band featured on his recent Grammy-nominated album, Multiverse. His performance will feature new arrangements and interpretations of Bernstein’s complete West Side Story score, which fused progressive big band jazz, lyric opera, modern dance, and Latin rhythms.

Leonard Bernstein at 100 with the Jazz at Lincoln Center Orchestra with Wynton Marsalis and Bobby Sanabria Multiverse Big Band: West Side Story at 60 Reimagined will take place in Frederick P. Rose Hall, home of Jazz at Lincoln Center, located at Broadway at 60th Street, New York, New York. For additional information and to purchase tickets, visit jazz.org

Jazz at Lincoln Center’s 2017–18 season celebrates the organization’s 30th anniversary. Since the first downbeat of its summer concert series in 1987, Jazz at Lincoln Center has been a vital part of the global cultural landscape. Jazz at Lincoln Center was established as an independent non-profit organization in 1996; opened Frederick P. Rose Hall, the “House of Swing”, in 2004, making it the world’s first venue designed specifically for jazz; and launched Blue Engine Records in 2014 to share its vast archive of recordings. Over the past three decades, Jazz at Lincoln Center has become an important advocate for jazz, culture, and arts education globally, reaching an audience of nearly 2 million people of all ages and experiences through concerts, webcasting, musical instruction, and distribution of music scores—the vast majority of which is free of charge. To date, Jazz at Lincoln Center has produced more than 1,200 original concerts in the New York City area, with the Jazz at Lincoln Center Orchestra having performed in over 446 cities in 41 countries on five continents. This milestone season reflects on 30 years of celebrating the universal language of music and the influence of jazz in the present day. Throughout the 2017–18 season, Jazz at Lincoln Center will bring together a wide array of events, projects, virtuoso musicians, composers, and educators to illustrate the collaborative nature of the art form. Jazz at Lincoln Center’s 2017–18 season features performances by renowned artists including Joey Alexander, Chick Corea, Paquito D’Rivera, Eliane Elias, Ellis Marsalis, Dick Hyman, Marilyn Maye, Steve Miller, and Dianne Reeves; as well as Jazz at Lincoln Center debuts by the Harlem Quartet and vocalist and songwriter Somi. The milestone season will conclude with a grand finale world premiere by Wynton Marsalis, Jazz at Lincoln Center’s Managing and Artistic Director.

TICKETINFORMATION:
All single tickets for The Appel Room and Rose Theater can be purchased at jazz.org 24 hours a day or through CenterCharge at 212-721-6500, open daily from 10am–9pm. Tickets can also be purchased at the Jazz at Lincoln Center Box Office, located on Broadway at 60th Street, ground floor. Reservations for Dizzy’s Club Coca-Cola can be made by calling 212-258-9595 or by visiting jazz.org

]]>Fri, 29 Sep 2017 05:41:00 +0000Jazz at Lincoln Center Orchestra Songbook Concerts Celebrate Band Members’ Original Workshttp://wyntonmarsalis.org/news/entry/jlco-songbook-concerts-celebrate-band-members-original-works
wynton_news_16753Jazz at Lincoln Center continues its 30th anniversary celebration by showcasing the brilliant composers and arrangers in its resident orchestra in a special concert event, Jazz at Lincoln Center Orchestra Songbook, on October 20-21 at 8pm in Rose Theater. Rose Theater, in Frederick P. Rose Hall, is located on Broadway at 60th Street, New York, New York.

The Jazz at Lincoln Center Orchestra band members including Walter Blanding, Chris Crenshaw, Vincent Gardner, Victor Goines, Carlos Henriquez, Sherman Irby, Wynton Marsalis, Ted Nash and Marcus Printup, have put forth a vast, innovative body of original work over the past decade. For these special performances, the world renowned big band will treat audiences to a collection of these compositions as well as arrangements of tunes by the greats Walter Donaldson, George Gershwin, Dizzy Gillespie, Joe Henderson, Mulgrew Miller, Thelonious Monk, Sonny Rollins and Wayne Shorter. These concerts will demonstrate the Jazz at Lincoln Center Orchestra Songbook comprises some of the finest and most stylistically diverse big band music in history.

“The Jazz at Lincoln Center Orchestra has no real competitors these days,” said the Chicago Tribune. “Other big bands play splendidly, in their own fashion, but only an organization that tours as prolifically as JLCO and maintains the same personnel for so many years could achieve this caliber of expressive control and technical acuity.”

“The orchestra is so dedicated to excellence and has performed for such a long time at an extremely high level on different styles of music and under all types of circumstances,” says Wynton Marsalis, Jazz at Lincoln Center’s Managing and Artistic Director. “If you consider that every position improvises, there are 10 arrangers, and we play an unprecedented variety of styles, there has never been anything like it in the history of our music.”

TICKETINFORMATION:
All single tickets for The Appel Room and Rose Theater can be purchased at jazz.org 24 hours a day or through CenterCharge at 212-721-6500, open daily from 10am–9pm. Tickets can also be purchased at the Jazz at Lincoln Center Box Office, located on Broadway at 60th Street, ground floor.

]]>Mon, 25 Sep 2017 05:36:00 +0000In Season Opener, Marsalis &amp; JLCO Pay Tribute to Jelly Roll Mortonhttp://wyntonmarsalis.org/news/entry/in-season-opener-marsalis-jlco-pay-tribute-to-jelly-roll-morton
wynton_news_16732“The Fantastic Mr. Jelly Lord,” the all-Jelly Roll Morton concert that opened the 2017 season of the Jazz at Lincoln Center Orchestra, revealed the continued relevance of the great New Orleans maestro and was as good a case as any for Wynton Marsalis’ credo that “all jazz is modern.”

The piano chair for the evening featured a rotating cast including three great young pianists (Aaron Diehl, Sullivan Fortner and the JLCO’s own Dan Nimmer) and a pair of even younger, highly promising Juilliard student pianists (Micha Thomas from Ohio and Joel Wenhardt from California). Playing a mix of original Morton charts and new interpretations arranged by JLCO members (and one by former member Wycliffe Gordon), the music sounded fresh and vivid—nothing like a dusty relic of another time.

Before a full house at Jazz at Lincoln Center’s plush, jewel-box-like Rose Theater, the 15 members entered from stage-right, looking sharp in matching dark gray suits (Brooks Brothers is a JALC sponsor), striped ties and brown shoes. Marsalis, in his customary role as host and explainer-in-chief, began the evening in self-deprecating fashion: “Tonight we have a lot of music to play, so you won’t get your customary, long-winded speeches about nothing,” he said. Before he introduced the band’s first number, however, he did note that, regardless of the truth of Morton’s claims that he “invented jazz,” he was “the first intellectual of jazz.”

A classically trained pianist, Morton was, by his own account, kicked out of his family’s home for playing jazz in New Orleans’ red-light district. Among his many distinctions, he was the first to show that this “unruly” music could be properly notated. His piano playing style was original and highly influential, and his striking compositions and arrangements for his Red Hot Peppers advanced the New Orleans jazz of his time with complex structures derived from ragtime and the European tradition.

The program combined familiar Morton standards like “King Porter Stomp” and “Jelly Roll Blues” with lesser-known works like the slow drag “Deep Creek” and “Burnin’ The Iceberg.”

The orchestra’s approach to these early jazz masterpieces was to reveal both the modern in Morton’s original arrangements and the roots that nourish the JLCO’s contemporary big band arranging. That philosophy was apparent in the first piano solo, by Diehl, on a fine update of “Little Lawrence” by clarinetist Victor Goines. Diehl’s advanced harmonies and rhythmic displacements were particularly noteworthy. Nimmer followed with an expressive, blues-drenched turn on “Mr. Joe,” (possibly named after New Orleans bandleader Joe “King” Oliver).

“Sidewalk Blues,” brilliantly arranged by alto saxophonist Sherman Irby, was a showstopper, beginning, as in the original, with the brass section simulating traffic noises and a near-accident, and an altercation that featured a comical dialogue between trombonists Vincent Gardner and Chris Crenshaw. In a confident piano solo, Fortner, a product of New Orleans, seemed to channel the ancestors. His two-fisted virtuosity with a Southern drawl got the audience cheering. He also contributed singular solos to a Marsalis arrangement of “King Porter Stomp,” a Goines arrangement of “Burnin’ The Iceberg” and a version of “The Crave” arranged by bassist Carlos Henriquez. The latter developed the tune’s tango-like rhythms into a fast-paced, Latin expansion of Morton’s composition. The “Latin tinge” became a high-energy salsa explosion.

Diehl’s impressive piano solo on “The Pearls,” although based in early New Orleans rhythms, included passages of post-bop rhythmic complexity and harmonic ambiguity. The two Juilliard students had multiple opportunities to shine. Thomas was featured on “Grandpa’s Spells” and the famously difficult “Fingerbreaker,” both of which he executed admirably. And Wenhardt, whom Marsalis described as “a poet,” offered a leisurely, exquisitely timed solo on the slow blues “Deep Creek” and another fascinating turn on the complex, exotic “Ganjam,” from Morton’s late period.

In the JLCO’s hands, Morton’s music sounded vital, un-dated and full of humor and invention. Early in the first set, Fortner told an anecdote: A few years ago, when he had only recently been introduced to Marsalis, he found himself sitting in the trumpeter’s living room. “We were drinking some expensive Scotch. And I told him I was having some problems with my music. He told me, ‘You need to listen to Jelly Roll Morton.’”

]]>Mon, 18 Sep 2017 23:18:00 +0000Blue Engine Records Announces the Release of Handful of Keyshttp://wyntonmarsalis.org/news/entry/blue-engine-records-announces-the-release-of-handful-of-keys
wynton_news_16671New York, NY – Friday, August 18, 2017 – Jazz at Lincoln Center’s Blue Engine Records today announced the release of Handful of Keys on September 15, 2017, a live recording of performances that captured 100 years of jazz piano in one night in Frederick P. Rose Hall at Jazz at Lincoln Center.

Today, the first single from Handful of Keys, “The Strawberry,” is available for streaming and download on all mass-market digital platforms. The album is also available to preorder on Jazz at Lincoln Center’s newly relaunched webstore, both as a standalone CD and as a deluxe bundle featuring limited-edition Jazz at Lincoln Center gear and a ticket discount for Jazz at Lincoln Center’s 30th Anniversary Season-opening concerts. The preorder bundle can be accessed via www.jazz.org/handful.

From rising stars to living legends, pianists Joey Alexander, Dick Hyman, Myra Melford, Helen Sung, Isaiah J. Thompson, and the Jazz at Lincoln Center Orchestra’s own Dan Nimmer grab hold of all 88 keys and reveal the full breadth of the piano’s evolution over the 20th century. With guests ranging in age from 13-year-old prodigy Alexander to 89-year-old American treasure Hyman, Wynton Marsalis and the JLCO survey jazz piano’s past and give the stage to several prodigies who are taking the instrument in bold new directions.

Handful of Keys captures the sold-out 2016-17 season opening concerts featuring the Jazz at Lincoln Center Orchestra with Wynton Marsalis and six virtuoso pianists representing the many styles of jazz and both the music’s past and its future. The title, Handful of Keys, references an efflorescent 1929 Fats Waller composition that is a signpost of early jazz piano. This release showcases a band in full “stride,” burning through electric arrangements of beloved compositions from James P. Johnson, Bill Evans, McCoy Tyner, and more.

“This concert demonstrates our ongoing commitment to the continuum and the belief in the non-segregation of generations,” says Wynton Marsalis, artistic and managing director of Jazz at Lincoln Center.

]]>Fri, 18 Aug 2017 10:46:00 +0000Jazz at Lincoln Center Announces 30th Anniversary Season Opening Weekend Events, September 14-17http://wyntonmarsalis.org/news/entry/jazz-at-lincoln-center-announces-30th-anniversary-season-opening-weekend
wynton_news_16678Jazz at Lincoln Center kicks off its milestone 30th anniversary celebration on September 14-17, 2017 with free concerts, tastings and an acclaimed roster of jazz artists on every stage of Frederick P. Rose Hall, the home of Jazz at Lincoln Center, on Broadway at 60th Street in New York, New York.

The celebratory weekend opens Jazz at Lincoln Center’s 2017-18 season, highlighting the artists and programs that are significant to the organization’s history, as well as the advocates and young talent –nurtured through Jazz at Lincoln Center’s education and outreach programs – that represent the future.

In Rose Theater, the Jazz at Lincoln Center Orchestra with Wynton Marsalis with celebrated pianist Aaron Diehl, rising star Sullivan Fortner, and Juilliard jazz students Micah Thomas and Joel Wenhardt will perform in The Fantastic Mr. Jelly Lord to honor New Orleans legend Jelly Roll Morton on September 14-16. ”Mr. Jelly Lord” was presented as one of Jazz at Lincoln Center’s first season concerts. Nearly 30 years later, the Jazz at Lincoln Center Orchestra and guests will perform the music of Jelly Roll Morton in a rare big band setting.

In The Appel Room, on September 15-16, composer and pianist Fred Hersch will be joined by Kurt Elling and Kate McGarry to reprise their acclaimed roles from Leaves of Grass which originally premiered at Carnegie Hall in 2005. In addition to honoring the life and poetry of American poet Walt Whitman, this performance features three artists who represent Jazz at Lincoln Center’s diverse programming aesthetic. Fred Hersch has performed on Jazz at Lincoln Center’s stages since 1999; Kurt Elling has graced every stage at Frederick P. Rose Hall and represented the organization globally for more than 12 years; and Kate McGarry has advanced the organization’s education and advocacy initiatives around the world. This performance will be McGarry’s Appel Room debut.

In Dizzy’s Club Coca-Cola, Herlin Riley, master drummer and founding Jazz at Lincoln Center Orchestra member, will lead his quintet on September 15-17. Riley’s band, featuring rising stars Emmet Cohen on piano, Russell Hall on bass, Bruce Harris on trumpet, and Godwin Louis on alto saxophone, will perform six sets in the Club as part of the eighth annual Coca-Cola Generations in Jazz Festival. The month-long festival, featuring a roster of over 200 performers, honors the masters of jazz and spotlights the next generation of jazz musicians. The Coca-Cola Generations in Jazz Festival schedule can be found on jazz.org/dizzys.

In the Mica and Ahmet Ertegun Atrium, on September 14-16, Jazz at Lincoln Center invites audiences to free concerts led by saxophonist Alexa Tarantino, tastings from New York City’s finest restaurants including Dizzy’s Club Coca-Cola, and a celebratory champagne toast at intermission.

]]>Thu, 17 Aug 2017 09:09:00 +0000The Wynton Marsalis Septet and Quintet performing at Jazz in Marciac 2017http://wyntonmarsalis.org/news/entry/the-wynton-marsalis-septet-and-quintet-performing-at-jazz-in-marciac-2017
wynton_news_16652Iraqi virtuoso oud player Naseer Shamma joins the Wynton Marsalis Septet for a night of music exhibiting how the oud is a perfect fit in the world of jazz. Fresh off their premiere performance together, Shamma and Marsalis’ group plan to perform some of the classic repertoire of Wynton’s Septet while also contributing new arrangements from Shamma’s catalog. Watch the live webcast on Monday August 7th at 6pm EDT (11pm CEST) on wyntonmarsalis.org/live and facebook.com/wyntonmarsalis

Grammy Award winning vocalist Cecile McLorin Salvant joins the Wynton Marsalis Quintet to explore new arrangements of both original compositions and jazz favorites. Still only in her 20s, the Miami-born Salvant, who spent several years in France at the Darius Milhaud Conservatory, has become a frequent collaborator with Marsalis and the Jazz at Lincoln Center Orchestra. Their Jazz in Marciac program will be sung (and swung!) in both English and French and will feature songs made famous by such greats as Josephine Baker and Damia. Watch the live webcast on Friday August 11th at 6pm EDT (11pm CEST) on wyntonmarsalis.org/live and facebook.com/wyntonmarsalis

Today, thirty years to the day Jazz at Lincoln Center produced its first concert series at Alice Tully Hall in New York City, Jazz at Lincoln Center announced the latest project from its in-house record label, Blue Engine Records: All Jazz is Modern: 30 Years of Jazz at Lincoln Center. Reflecting the organization’s three-decade history, this series of 30 iconic singles will be released digitally throughout the 2017-18 season. The first three singles are available today for download, on streaming platforms and www.jazz.org/modern:

The first three singles from All Jazz is Modern were recorded more recently but are deeply symbolic of the institution’s history. “The Strawberry,” a composition by guest pianist Myra Melford, was recorded with the Jazz at Lincoln Center Orchestra (JLCO) during the 2016-17 concert season, demonstrates Jazz at Lincoln Center’s commitment to the idea that All Jazz Is Modern with its bold, playful ménage of the blues, Latin rhythms, and avant-garde harmony. “Ring Shout,” a Marsalis original, was recorded during the JLCO’s history-making trip to Cuba, which also provided the material for “Live in Cuba,” Blue Engine’s inaugural release. And “Single Petal of a Rose” is a poignant ballad featuring Joe Temperley, a long-time member of the Duke Ellington Orchestra who occupied the JLCO’s baritone saxophone chair from the group’s inception until his passing last year at the age of 86.

Blue Engine Records’ All Jazz is Modern: 30 Years of Jazz at Lincoln Center digs into the institution’s extensive concert recording archives, which feature—in addition to the Jazz at Lincoln Center Orchestra with Wynton Marsalis—a long list of jazz luminaries including Tony Bennett, Betty Carter, and Benny Carter. Many of these songs are still archived in analog and outdated digital formats (DTRS) and will be digitized in order to be preserved and ultimately released. These singles, including newly digitized and remixed archival recordings from the late 1980s onward, will be available to a global audience launching first as playlists on Spotify and Apple Music, for download and on streaming platforms. The project will likely see a physical release in spring or summer 2018.

]]>Fri, 04 Aug 2017 09:11:00 +0000Marsalis’ ‘jazz of integrity’ charms Shanghaihttp://wyntonmarsalis.org/news/entry/marsalis-jazz-of-integrity-charms-shanghai
wynton_news_16615WYNTON Marsalis and the Jazz at Lincoln Center Orchestra (JLCO) had Shanghai audiences on their feet at the 2017 Music in the Summer Air (MISA) in early July with his “jazz of integrity.”

JLCO with 15 members presented such works as “Windows,” “Dean Man Blues” and “The Happiness of Being” at Shanghai Symphony Hall, while Marsalis, 56, as the artistic director and lead trumpeter, helped introduce the pieces and members of his group on the way.

“All jazz is modern,” Marsalis said. “It is more like people talking, telling people’s recognition of tragedy and optimism … It never dies.”

Born in a family of jazz musicians in New Orleans, Marsalis played music since childhood. His talent was widely recognized even before he turned 20. With nine Grammys in both jazz and classical music, his “Blood on the Fields” was the first jazz composition to win the Pulitzer Prize for Music.

The American is widely portrayed as “the savior of jazz” in the 1980s, when it was at odds with electronic, rock and punk music. But he was more inclined to identify himself as a man who loves jazz, and was willing to defend its integrity even if no one else did.

“So many times, I was portrayed as negative and against this or that. But actually, I’m not against anything. I am for the integrity of jazz music.

“That doesn’t mean I don’t play fusion or don’t play with other people. It means that our music has an identity and that identity is special; it is what makes our music special; it is what we need to know in order to be jazz musician,” Marsalis said.

Q: What is the “jazz spirit” according to your understanding?

A: Jazz has three fundamentals: first is improvisation. Improvisation is freedom; its “I.” It’s a very satisfying statement of your individuality. I improvise. But that’s balanced by swing. Swing means “we.” So yes, you improvise, but you have to improvise with me. You can’t improvise for as long as you want, we have to find each other.

And the last component is the blues. The blues is the form, and the scale. It’s the harmony. It is also aesthetic, a way of perceiving the world. And that way of perceiving the world is optimizing in the face of recognizing tragedy. Bad things happen, but I am still coming back tomorrow.

So those are the three components of jazz. And in jazz you have to play blues, convincingly and with feeling. And you have to improvise and create logic and order from chaos. And swing, play in time.

Q: You were often credited as a savior for jazz. Do you think jazz needs to be saved?

A: No, I think jazz is an art form. When I came along as a young person, 18 or 19 years old, I believed in the integrity of the music when a lot of older musicians didn’t. I gave it a kind of boost. But jazz doesn’t need anyone to save it. Art forms tend to stay around. Take Greed tragedy for example. There’s a handful of great tragedians. And we didn’t know about it for a long time until William Shakespeare. Likewise, jazz didn’t need a savior. There were great arts in every period. I was just a young person who loved the music.

Q: It is said that you keep loyal to the “genuine jazz” — no fusion. Why?

A: I believe in integrity. Fusion is a type of corruption to jazz. The fundamental rhythm of jazz is swing. So when you alter the fundamental rhythm of the music to be more rock and roll, that’s another form of music. It doesn’t mean that’s bad, but it’s a corruption of jazz.

Jazz is based on improvisation, in a mobile environment. When it becomes static, then there’s less chance to improvise. So when the music is about the interplay of musicians, like a conversation, and when the music gets above a certain volume, what kind of conversation are you going to have?

There are elements of corruption in terms of it being considered as an innovation in jazz. It’s actually another form of music. It is more of R&B, funk or rock style than jazz style. So I’m speaking more about semantics than I am about the music.

I am open to all kinds of music and I have fun with all kinds of music, but jazz has an integrity and a purpose of its own. There’s no need for it to constantly sacrifice its identity in order for it to claim its worth and its value. It’s like if I tell you for me to like you, you can be everything but not Chinese, and now you have to sit up with everything that’s not Chinese and smile.

I came directly from the jazz tradition, so yes I defend it. If no one else in the world defends it, I still will.

Q: Have you tried other music forms?

A: Yes, there are many forms I like. I’ve collaborated with flamenco musicians, tango bands, mandolin players and symphony orchestras. I did a recording of Brazilian music. I played with Willie Nelson in country music and Eric Clapton in the blues. The list can go on and on.

The forms that interest me the least are the most commercial forms. There are thousands of forms of music that are not commercial. But since commercial things have been so overwhelmingly successful, there’s a kind of a thought that everyone must follow that and there’s no room for anyone to say “I’m not really a follower of commercial things.” But, I am really not.

Q: Do you feel differently when playing classic pieces and jazz?

A: Yes, It is really different. In jazz, you’re improvising, and conversing with other musicians who are also improvising. You don’t know exactly what they’re going to play, so you’re creating something together.

But in classical music, you know what you’re playing. It’s written and you’re trying to bring it to life and bring an intensity and a seriousness to that form. And you’re also playing with other musicians but you don’t have that element of “I don’t know what you’re going to play.”

I enjoy playing jazz more because I’m from the jazz tradition. But I also love classical music.

Q: Do you think it is necessary to bring jazz to concert halls?

A: I don’t think it’s necessary. The first jazz concert was given by Benny Goodman in 1938 at Carnegie Hall. For many years, jazz musicians have played in concert halls, but it doesn’t mean that we do not play in clubs any more.

We embrace all the venues that we play in. The question is more the quality of the music than the place.

Jazz music requires an education for it to be popular. It’s like classical music. Neither of the two is popular today, since neither of them is on TV.

They are not popular because we have not done a good job of bringing our younger people into things that are adult. Your youth is not a market. When you view younger people as if they were a market, then it is difficult to make mature decisions. Classical music has a lot of infrastructures like halls, schools, scores, libraries and orchestras, while those for jazz is still limited.

]]>Sat, 15 Jul 2017 19:06:00 +00003rd Annual Summer Jazz Academy, Bard College, Annandale-on-Hudson, New York July 17-30http://wyntonmarsalis.org/news/entry/3rd-annual-summer-jazz-academy-bard-college-annandale-on-hudson-new-york
wynton_news_16581Jazz at Lincoln Center announces its 3rd annual premier high school program, Summer Jazz Academy, in residence at Bard College in Annandale-on-Hudson, New York from July 17 – 30. Forty-four advanced high school jazz students from across the U.S. and Cuba were selected to participate in the two-week rigorous training institute designed and instructed by Jazz at Lincoln Center Artistic and Managing Director, Wynton Marsalis.

“We’re incredibly excited to celebrate our 3rd Annual Summer Jazz Academy at Bard College,” said Dr. Michael Albaugh, Summer Jazz Academy Program Director and Director of Operations, Education, at Jazz at Lincoln Center. “This year, we welcome 44 amazingly talented high school students who will spend two weeks in this jazz-centric environment working with the most dedicated and committed faculty anywhere. Through improvisation we will teach personal confidence, through swing we will teach good manners and team work, through the blues we will encourage emotional depth and determined optimism.”

In May, 15 of the top high school jazz bands in the U.S. competed in Jazz at Lincoln Center’s 22nd Annual Essentially Ellington High School Jazz Band Competition and Festival. The organization continues the momentum of fostering the next generation of jazz talent with Summer Jazz Academy.

The program is a tuition-free summer intensive dedicated to providing a holistic educational experience and foundation for talented and aspiring high school jazz musicians. Students will perform in big bands and small combos, receive private instruction, and experience classes in aesthetics, culture, history, performance practice and pedagogy. Students will gain insight to American vernacular music and jazz specific techniques, learn the communal history of jazz in a socio-political context, receive guidance on how to interact with an audience as an artist and entertainer, and gain awareness of the mission of jazz musicians today building on the aspirations laid by earlier generations.

The curriculum and format is based on Jazz at Lincoln Center’s 30 year history of education in jazz performance and appreciation. In addition to this educational component, the Summer Jazz Academy program culminates with three public performances in Bard College’s Olin Hall featuring the student combos, student big bands, along with the Jazz at Lincoln Center Orchestra with Wynton Marsalis.

PUBLICPERFORMANCES:

All performances are held in Olin Hall located in the Fisher Center for the Performing Arts on Bard College’s Campus at 60 Manor Avenue, Annandale-on-Hudson, New York. Tickets can be purchased at: http://fishercenter.bard.edu/jazzatlincolncenter/

JAZZ AT LINCOLNCENTERORCHESTRAWITHWYNTONMARSALIS
July 29, 7pm | Olin Hall
The Jazz at Lincoln Center Orchestra with Wynton Marsalis (JLCO), comprising 15 of the finest jazz soloists and ensemble players today, has been the Jazz at Lincoln Center resident orchestra since 1988. This remarkably versatile orchestra performs and leads educational events in New York, across the U.S. and around the globe; in concert halls, dance venues, jazz clubs, public parks; and with symphony orchestras, ballet troupes, local students; and an ever-expanding roster of guest artists.

]]>Thu, 29 Jun 2017 06:29:00 +0000Ten Minutes with Wynton Marsalishttp://wyntonmarsalis.org/news/entry/ten-minutes-with-wynton-marsalis
wynton_news_16495Wynton Marsalis got his break as a teen on his trumpet at Tanglewood. The Grammy Award–winning artist returns to the area with his “Jazz at Lincoln Center Orchestra” for the Mahaiwe’s July 30 fundraising gala. Marsalis, who describes jazz as a “metaphor for democracy,” makes it his mission to create a collaborative environment for musicians, much like in the Berkshires from 1950-1979, when artists like Louis Armstrong, Dizzy Gillespie, Count Basie, Miles Davis, and Thelonious Monk played at the Music Inn.

How do you view the Berkshires?
It’s like coming home. It has had such an impact on me and my growth as a musician at such a crucial time.

Tell me about first coming here at age 17, as part of the Berkshire Music Center.
It changed my life, to be associated with the Boston Symphony Orchestra, one of the finest organizations in the world. I had never been out of the South, and the students I met, I still see them, and I still have a relationship with them. When I come here, I’m cognizant of being part of that tradition and reminded of what it has meant to me. It’s a sort of magic. It’s like your grandma’s house, somewhere that you’d like to be. No matter your age, it still resonates.

How did Gunther Schuller, who ran the Berkshire Music Center from 1970 to 1984 at Tanglewood, impact you?
Schuller wrote the definitive book on jazz. I was very close and respectful of him, and he was a great force. I spent a lot of time around and exposed to him, and he encouraged me. He was a profound musical figure.

You didn’t begin your training in jazz?
At that time, jazz or classical, it was the same band training. That’s changed for jazz students, and it’s to their detriment. The technical foundation of music is not a style of music. We need to make our technical foundation stronger.

Is jazz alive and well?
It’s a struggle because our country is struggling. Integrity is a very delicate thing. It’s a familiar concept, but that struggle is very real—in political practices, financial, cultural. It’s extremely clear, but, like water, it’s easy to turn it red or green or blue. Somewhere, there’s a need for a celebration of integrity.

On “CBS This Morning,” you said Trump’s proposed cuts to arts education is preparing the public to be “more ignorant.” What do you mean?
We need to find a center road that we all can ride on. If the ship is listing, if you jump on one side of it, that’s the stupidest thing to do. We need mature leadership and wisdom. I will do what I’ve been doing all along, and embody our art form. Go to schools, play jazz, play others’ music. The foundation of what I believe hasn’t changed much, and I have no problem saying it. I’m not holding to any constituency. I’m an artist. I’m a musician, unflinching in my views that I project.

What should we do?
We cannot settle for period victory. We need to take the center road. Each side believes freedom of speech gives you the right to be insulting. We’ve been listing, left to right, since the 1960s. We need to try to find a way to come together. We need to pull out the best of what our people have achieved and use that as a gold standard in achieving whatever we need now—whether it’s Abraham Lincoln, or Duke Ellington in music, Walt Whitman in literature.

How does jazz speak to our younger musicians and transcend class?
It’s ageless. Its fundamental thoughts don’t require you to be anything.

What music artists today impress you?
There are so many. [Jazz singer] Cécile McLorin Salvant, Joey Alexander, a lot of my students at Juilliard. At our club [Dizzy’s Club Coca-Cola] the other night, there were so many great musicians in one place. I couldn’t believe it. Forty musicians who could really play, from 18 years old to 65, all up there playing. People were dancing.

How are you connecting our youth with jazz music?
Making it available to them, and creating possibilities. At the Music Inn, there were jazz sessions, Aaron Copeland visited. Louis Armstrong, Dizzy Gillespie, Duke Ellington played; people in their 30s and 20s and some older. It was a spirit of collaboration. We have to figure out our default position to be together without so many people sacrifices.

What’s your greatest pleasure in music?
It’s all pleasurable. I like to practice, I like to play at elementary schools and at jam sessions, I like to listen to people play.

Is it a lot of pressure, the legacy you hold and need to pass down?
As I get older, I’ve increased my intensity and become even more productive. There’s a certain wisdom that develops as you interface with people across time. You refine your perspective and become less ignorant. I grew up with my father struggling alone, living with hate and prejudice in New Orleans. I don’t take it lightly. Schuller let me audition with the Berkshire Music Center, even when I was too young. He urged me and gave me confidence and had me become part of that tradition. Leonard Bernstein let me look at all his scripts for young concerts as I was wanting to write my own. He treated me like a real person. We’re all connected. I do not feel pressure. I’m recording, our band is trying to represent the swing. We are applying the pressure.

Jazz at Lincoln Center proudly announces the top three high school jazz bands in the nation that took the highest honors tonight at the prestigious 22nd Annual Essentially Ellington High School Jazz Band Competition & Festival at Frederick P. Rose Hall, home of Jazz at Lincoln Center.

The first-place winner is Tucson Jazz Institute from Tucson, AZ. This is the third time Tucson Jazz Institute has taken first-place honors including 2013 and 2014. The second-place winner is Denver School of the Arts from Denver, CO and third-place winner is Dillard Center for the Arts from Fort Lauderdale, FL. The honorable mention winner is Newark Academy from Newark, NJ.

Beginning on May 11, the top 15 high school jazz bands in the country participated in the Essentially Ellington High School Jazz Band Competition & Festival and for the first time ever, Essentially Ellington welcomed guests from the Orquesta Juvenil de Jazz de Cuba to perform in exhibition. Their performance enriched the community and expanded Jazz at Lincoln Center’s reach to the educational system in Havana. All 16 bands were immersed in three days of mentoring, jam sessions, and workshops.

On Friday, May 12, the competition kicked off with a second line parade, United We Swing, with all participating bands, hosts, community members and city officials parading from Columbus Circle Park to the Jazz at Lincoln Center marquee at the Time Warner Center. The United We Swing second line parade was held in celebration and support of arts programs and arts education nationwide.

This evening, the competition culminated with each top-placing band performing alongside their choice of guest soloist from the Jazz at Lincoln Center Orchestra. The final concert also featured the world-renowned Jazz at Lincoln Center Orchestra with Wynton Marsalis – whose members served as mentors for the finalist bands throughout the festival. The Orchestra performed the music of Chick Webb and Duke Ellington which will be featured in next year’s Essentially Ellington Program.

During the culminating ceremony, Wynton Marsalis presented awards to each of the finalist high school jazz bands. Tucson Jazz Institute accepted the first-place trophy and an award of $5,000. Denver School of the Arts accepted the second-place trophy and an award of $2,500. Dillard Center for the Arts accepted the third-place trophy with an award of $1,000. The remaining finalist bands were each awarded a cash prize of $500. All monetary awards are to be used for improving the jazz education programs of each respective high school.

In the spirit of creativity and the continuation of the jazz legacy, Jazz at Lincoln Center also recognized the winner of the 5th Annual Dr. J. Douglas White Essentially Ellington Student Composition/Arranging Contest, Ethan Moffitt of Verdugo Academy (Glendale, CA). Each submission was critiqued by composer, arranger, and Jazz at Lincoln Center Orchestra saxophonist, Ted Nash, and the winning selection was recorded by the Jazz at Lincoln Center Orchestra at their annual Essentially Ellington recording session on Wednesday, May 10. In addition, the winning composer received a cash prize, a composition lesson with Ted Nash, and a trip to New York City to observe the Jazz at Lincoln Center Orchestra recording session and the 2017 Essentially Ellington Competition & Festival.

The Competition & Festival is the culmination of the annual Essentially Ellington High School Jazz Band Program (EE), which also includes non-competitive regional festivals around the country, teaching resources, a summer Band Director Academy, and more. The year-long Essentially Ellington program will have distributed more than 36,000 newly transcribed scores by the end of this school year. For more information including background, history and audio recordings of the Essentially Ellington repertoire and more, visit: www.jazz.org/ee.

This year, the Essentially Ellington Competition & Festival was accessible via social media on Facebook, Twitter EssEllington, and Instagram jazzdotorg. Throughout the weekend, students, viewers, and participants shared their thoughts and photos by using the hashtag #EssentiallyEllington, #Ellington17 and #UnitedWeSwing.

]]>Sun, 14 May 2017 02:46:00 +0000Wynton Marsalis on Judging Panel as More Than 300 Students Compete in Essentially Ellington 2017http://wyntonmarsalis.org/news/entry/wynton-marsalis-judging-panel-300-students-essentially-ellington-2017
wynton_news_16430Jazz at Lincoln Center Managing and Artistic Director Wynton Marsalis will serve on a judging panel as more than 300 students from the top 15 high school jazz bands across the nation compete in Jazz at Lincoln Center’s 22nd annual Essentially Ellington High School Jazz Band Competition & Festival, the largest gathering of high school age jazz musicians in America. Competition events will take place beginning on Thursday, May 11th and will continue through Saturday, May 13th.

As part of this year’s Essentially Ellington Competition & Festival, on Friday, May 12th, the bands will also join Marsalis, musicians and community members, including New York State Assemblymember Richard Gottfried, in the United We Swing “Second Line” Parade from Columbus Circle Park to Jazz at Lincoln Center’s Frederick P. Rose Hall. At the Parade, students will perform traditional brass band tunes along Columbus Circle, in celebration and support of arts programs and arts education nationwide.

When: Thursday, May 11Q&A session with Wynton Marsalis and Open rehearsal with Jazz at Lincoln Center Orchestra with Wynton Marsalis
12pm: Media check-in in the Atrium
1:30pm: Wynton Marsalis Q&A Session and Open Rehearsal
Rose Theater

Jam Session with the Jazz at Lincoln Center Orchestra and Essentially Ellington Students
7:15pm: Media check-in in the Atrium
7:30pm: Jam session
The Appel Room

Friday, May 12United We Swing “Second Line” Parade
Participating bands, band directors, Jazz at Lincoln Center musicians, parents, community members and elected officials, including New York State Assemblymember Richard Gottfried, will parade in celebration and support of art programs and arts education nationwide. Members of the public are encouraged to join. Anyone can RSVP for the United We Swing Parade at jazz.org/unitedweswing, or follow along on social media at #UnitedWeSwing.

Final Concert and Awards Ceremony
Performances featuring the top three placing bands and the Jazz at Lincoln Center Orchestra with Wynton Marsalis
7:00pm: Media check-in in Atrium
7:30pm: Concert and Awards ceremony
Rose Theater

By his own admission, there are very few moments when Foxborough High School Music Director Steve Massey is speechless. One of those moments took place Sunday afternoon when a jazz legend made a guest appearance at Massey’s final Pops concert before his retirement at the end of the school year.

Wynton Marsalis, whose accolades include a Pulitzer Prize, a National Medal of Arts, and nine Grammys, surprised Massey at one of the biggest events of the years for the Foxborough music program.

“I just want to speak to the depth of love and respect I have for Mr. Massey, what he represents to our culture and who he is as a man,” Marsalis said. I told him if I had to walk here, I would have walked here. That’s the type of respect I have for this man.”

Marsalis described Massey in three attributes – integrity, love, and soul and generosity of spirit. He said when Massey walks into the room, “All of our music is brought into the room with him because of the level of his integrity and the depth of it.”

The way that his bands perform and his will to sacrifice are seen in his love of the music, Marsalis said.

Finally, there was soul and generosity of spirit.

“Soul means when you walk into a room, people feel better when you leave than before you came in,” he said. It is an honor and privilege for me to come here today and to recognize him in front of the community, in front of the kids and I want you to know the depth of love I have for this man,” he said.

As noted by Marsalis, Massey’s career has earned respect and admiration from music directors, teachers, musicians, and members of the music community around the world.

“I represent all of them when I say more than a job well done, the definition of the job. Thank you for all you’ve contributed. We love you very much and deeply and nd you were great,” he said.

]]>Mon, 08 May 2017 06:41:00 +0000All Rise: Strathmore’s Most Ambitious Production of the Seasonhttp://wyntonmarsalis.org/news/entry/all-rise-strathmores-most-ambitious-production-of-the-season
wynton_news_16423

Dress rehearsal at Strathmore (photo By Edgar Artiga)

The rehearsal for Strathmore’s biggest production of the 2016-2017 season is going smoothly—for the most part. During a break between movements, conductor William Eddins chastises the choir for seeming distracted. “Tomorrow,” he says, “I want all eyes on me.”

During the show, most eyes will be on Wynton Marsalis, the famed trumpeter and composer who wrote the jazz symphony All Rise, the most complicated and expensive of 47 productions Strathmore will put on this season. The show includes the 15-piece Jazz at Lincoln Center Orchestra, 62 musicians from the National Philharmonic, 10 soloists from New York’s Chorale Le Chateau and a 135-person choir with singers from Baltimore’s Morgan State University and the Choral Arts Society of Washington. Then there are the dozens of people who are responsible for planning—from the size of the orchestra and choir to how they’ll all fit onstage—and logistics, like keeping track of sheet music and shuttling performers around North Bethesda.

The two shows, both sold out on a Friday night and Sunday afternoon in February, have been 15 months in the making. On the Tuesday before, Marsalis and the Jazz at Lincoln Center Orchestra arrived from New York; the musicians stayed at the Cambria Hotel & Suites in Rockville. That morning, a truck delivered their instruments, microphones and black suits. Several days earlier, 100 pounds of sheet music made its way via FedEx from New York to Strathmore. In the concert hall, lead stage technician William Kassman, who has worked at the music center since it opened in 2005, has added platforms where the musicians will play. He has pushed a black Steinway Model D grand piano onto an industrial equipment elevator that took it to the stage level. He has arranged chairs and music stands, and moved risers into place.

The day before opening night, Marsalis and the Jazz at Lincoln Center Orchestra are in the center of the stage surrounded by National Philharmonic musicians, rehearsing different parts of the 12-movement symphony. In the middle of a song, Marsalis signals Eddins and the musicians to stop. The violins don’t sound right. They should be “scratchier.” A violinist runs her bow over her strings, producing a discordant buzz. “That’s exactly it,” Marsalis says. She smiles and explains how she created the sound. The music starts again. The National Philharmonic players are in awe of Marsalis and the jazz musicians. “I have never seen so many happy orchestra players, and orchestra musicians are notoriously unhappy,” says National Philharmonic principal violist Julius Wirth.

Eddins keeps an eye on an analog clock on the right edge of the stage. Strict union rules prohibit the musicians from practicing more than 150 minutes a day, including a 20-minute break.

In the wings, production manager Shari Moxley checks a digital clock. With so many groups involved in this production, Strathmore hired her as a freelancer to coordinate all of them. Petite but authoritative, she’s organized and efficient, with clipboard in hand. She’s tracking times and schedules, talking with Eddins and choral director Damien Sneed, and communicating with the music center’s technical crew.

More than 100 members of the Morgan State University Choir are set to arrive on two buses. They can warm up in the concert hall seats, Moxley says. Warm-ups also are happening in the Comcast Circles Lounge, off the lobby, where Sneed plays a rippling version of “Amazing Grace” on the piano while the voices of 10 soloists from Chorale Le Chateau soar. Sneed worked with the chorale in New York for four weeks, in addition to making weekly trips to help the other choirs “interpret the spirit of the work,” he says. He coached them to express a tone and feeling that would reflect All Rise’s blend of gospel, jazz, blues, swing and classical music.

At 7 p.m., it’s time for the run-through, the first time the musicians and singers perform the full piece together. Choir members join the musicians seated onstage and take their places on the risers. At the back of the concert hall, lead audio technician Caldwell Gray sits in the dark behind a massive sound board equipped with hundreds of dials and switches. “We can sweeten the sound a bit,” he says, listening and adjusting the levels. For Gray, All Rise is one of the simpler productions he’s worked on. Unlike rock concerts or theatrical performances, which can require microphones, amplifiers or other tools to project sound, All Rise uses just a few small microphones and the acoustics of the concert hall. “It’s a little unusual to have a jazz orchestra and a symphony orchestra together on stage, but this is a standard large-orchestra-with-chorus arrangement,” he says. “This is what the room is made for. It was built to be all about Wagner and Mahler and Beethoven. It’s a hugely reverberant space.”

It’s opening night, a few hours before the concert begins, and programming manager Sarah Farmer is on the move. She’s responsible for logistics, including booking the housing and travel arrangements for the artists, issuing contracts and payments, and scheduling rehearsals. She’s winding through hallways and stairways on her way to check on the volunteers. In a storage room, Judy Doctor and Jean Williams set up a cellphone check for the Morgan State choir members. Farmer wants the college students, who are used to having their digital devices with them at all times, to understand: No phones are allowed onstage. Then Farmer is off, up some stairs and down in an elevator to stock tables outside the dressing rooms with bags of chips and bottles of water. “We’re always moving for shows,” she says, and this production is one of the busiest. “Some days I’ll check my Fitbit and see I’ve walked like 4 miles.”

In the upstairs lobby, an army of ushers wearing blue, button-down Strathmore shirts chat as they wait for Allen McCallum, the director of front-of-house operations, to call their names and provide assignments. Fifty-five of them—all volunteers—will man doorways and aisles, take tickets and show patrons to their seats.

Eight minutes until showtime. There’s a flurry of activity as violin and viola players line up cases on a ledge backstage and jazz musicians stroll from a couch near the dressing rooms out to the stage. Among them, Marsalis walks from his dressing room through the wing, carrying his trumpet, entering from stage left. He’s smiling and relaxed, dressed in a crisp black suit. He takes his seat in the middle of the stage.

Two and a half hours later, back in the wing, Marsalis congratulates the singers and musicians with handshakes. There’s a sense of elation. “He’s so gracious,” says National Philharmonic double bass player Barbara Fitzgerald. “It’s amazing to be in the midst of these fantastic world-class musicians.”

After the lights come on and the audience filters out, the stage is cleared for the next day’s performance by the Baltimore Symphony Orchestra. Kassman rides with the risers as the platform that’s holding them is lowered like an elevator below the stage. He rolls the piano off the stage and into a wing, stacks chairs and removes music stands. It takes about 30 minutes. The Jazz at Lincoln Center Orchestra will play a concert in Pennsylvania Saturday night before they and all of the key players—musicians and otherwise—return to Strathmore Sunday for the final performance of All Rise.

“To be part of that kind of work is really inspiring,” McCallum says. “When you go into the hall and you see that kind of performance on that scale, you realize that you’ve been a small part of it. Art exists on the stage, but there’s a lot of pieces that come together to make it happen.”

]]>Tue, 02 May 2017 08:33:00 +0000High School Jazz Students, Wynton Marsalis, in United We Swing Paradehttp://wyntonmarsalis.org/news/entry/high-school-jazz-students-wynton-marsalis-in-united-we-swing-parade
wynton_news_16419On Friday, May 12th, more than 300 high school jazz musicians, band directors and parents will be joined by world-renowned musician and Jazz at Lincoln Center’s Managing and Artistic Director Wynton Marsalis, musicians and community members in United We Swing, a “Second Line” Parade from Columbus Circle Park to Jazz at Lincoln Center’s Frederick P. Rose Hall, in celebration and support of arts programs and arts education nationwide.

Led by a trumpet call from a Jazz at Lincoln Center musician, the Second Line – a traditional brass band parade in jazz and New Orleans culture – will serve as a kickoff for Jazz at Lincoln Center’s 22nd Annual Essentially Ellington High School Jazz Band Competition & Festival, an innovative jazz education program that will bring 15 high school jazz bands to New York City for workshops and performances. As part of the United We Swing Parade, the students will perform traditional brass band tunes along Columbus Circle. Through this event, Marsalis and Jazz at Lincoln Center will lift up these emerging jazz artists as the future of our nation’s arts, and our collective wisdom and memory.

Members of the public are encouraged to join. Anyone can RSVP for the United We Swing Parade at jazz.org/unitedweswing, or follow along on social media at #UnitedWeSwing.

The United We Swing Parade, while honoring the students and band directors competing in Essentially Ellington, will also showcase how unique arts education programs empower young artists to learn, create and play. Amidst proposed cuts to arts funding in the federal budget, this Second Line seeks to demonstrate both the importance of preserving the arts as well as the need to protect the next generation’s access to arts education, which is the foundation of their self-expression and free speech.

“Over Essentially Ellington’s 22-year history, we have given thousands of young people the opportunity to engage with our greatest music at the very highest level. By providing a national stage from which to do so, we have had the privilege of watching many of them develop into artists of significant stature with a profound understanding of our music and its importance in American culture”, said Todd Stoll, Vice President of Education at Jazz at Lincoln Center. “Essentially Ellington is an annual celebration of the accomplishments of not only these students, but of their teachers, schools, families, and entire communities, coming together for a common artistic goal. When we empower young people within any art form, it has an exponential effect; engaging all of those around them and increasing our common understanding and shared humanity. That’s why we are thrilled to be celebrating Essentially Ellington, these students and teachers with a swinging Second Line – they represent thousands of people in communities across our nation that love, engage, and support the arts, and we hope that all New Yorkers will join us in doing so!”

Essentially Ellington has stood for 22 years as one of the most innovative jazz education events in the world because of its commitment to sharing teaching resources and empowering young jazz artists to learn, create and play. As a result, students have developed a deeper sense of engagement with the world around them, taking pride in their work and achievements.

After three days of rehearsals, workshops and learning from professional jazz musicians, Essentially Ellington will conclude with a concert and awards ceremony featuring the three top-placing bands and the Jazz at Lincoln Center Orchestra. Tickets for all festival events are available here. They will also be webcast live on jazz.org/live

]]>Tue, 02 May 2017 06:07:00 +0000JALC and Harlem School of the Arts Announce New Series of Innovative Jazz Educationhttp://wyntonmarsalis.org/news/entry/jalc-harlem-school-of-the-arts-new-series-of-jazz-education
wynton_news_16420Jazz at Lincoln Center Managing and Artistic Director Wynton Marsalis, and Harlem School of the Arts President Eric Pryor, have announced two world-class, tuition free, jazz education programs and performance series at the Harlem School of the Arts in New York City.

A grant from the Herb Alpert Foundation to Jazz at Lincoln Center will fund the two innovative programs: Jazz for Young People on Tour and Harlem School of the Arts Beginning Band.

On Saturday, May 6, from 12-2pm, Jazz at Lincoln Center will present a Jazz For Young People: Jazz and the Civil Rights Era concert at the Harlem School for the Arts, featuring the Alphonso Horne ensemble. Admission is free. Families are encouraged to RSVP by going to http://bit.ly/2oPoPCm.

“I can’t think of better partners than Jazz at Lincoln Center and the Harlem School of the Arts to expand and deepen the artistic horizons of students and the community,” said legendary musician and philanthropist Herb Alpert. In 2012, the Herb Alpert Foundation established a major gift that ensured the future of the Harlem School of the Arts.

“Herb’s deep commitment to the Harlem School of the Arts has transformed the community’s appreciation for the arts. We’re grateful for his gift which enables us to develop more diverse audiences for the music in the Harlem community,” said Wynton Marsalis, Managing and Artistic Director, Jazz at Lincoln Center. “The Herb Alpert Foundation and Jazz at Lincoln Center share a belief that diversity and community create an environment for our young people to flourish and this collaboration allows us to foster artists and advocates for the future. Harlem should be a place where jazz is venerated and respected and this is a good step toward ensuring that the music’s history does not go by the wayside.”

The two programs, begun in the current school year, are designed to introduce young students to basic concepts in jazz, its extensive repertoire, development and context within American history and culture, and the variety of musical genres that comprise the jazz canon.

Jazz at Lincoln Center programs at Harlem School of the Arts include:

Jazz for Young People On Tour: “Let Freedom Swing”
Free Saturday afternoon concerts at Harlem School for the Arts featuring professional jazz ensembles in hour-long performances that educate young audiences about jazz’s rich heritage, and potentially foster a lifelong relationship with the music. The program also places jazz in a historical context through an engaging, interactive format. “Let Freedom Swing” offers three distinct but thematically linked programs that are aligned with the New York City Department of Education social-studies standards: Jazz and Democracy, Jazz and the Harlem Renaissance, and Jazz and the Civil Rights Era.

Harlem School of the Arts Beginning Band
A tuition-free program, comprised of 6th and 7th grade students who will participate in classes twice per week as well as master classes with distinguished jazz professionals who will perform throughout the year at Harlem School of the Arts. The innovative curriculum, co-written by Wynton Marsalis, “An American Approach to Band”, teaches from a relevant cultural and aesthetic viewpoint and includes the “American musical imperatives” of blues, improvisation, and ear training.

About Jazz at Lincoln Center Education:
Jazz at Lincoln Center’s education programs drive our organization’s efforts to advance the appreciation, understanding, and performance of jazz. Our programs have been developed under the guiding vision of Managing and Artistic Director Wynton Marsalis, who during his visits to schools throughout our nation observed that the caliber of jazz education was often inferior to that of other fine arts. In response, Jazz at Lincoln Center offers a continuum of jazz education programs that are designed to suit the varied interests and capabilities of children, teens, and adults. Students learn about jazz’s distinctly American heritage and history as well as its greatest musicians and compositions; they explore its connection to other art forms and study how to play jazz. Today, over two-thirds of Jazz at Lincoln Center’s programming is educational—reaching more than 1,000,000 individuals of all ages and experiences in all 50 states through concerts, webcasting, and direct musical instruction and distribution of music scores free of charge.

About The Harlem School of the Arts:
Harlem School of the Arts enriches the lives of young people and their families through world-class training in and exposure to the arts across multiple disciplines in an environment that emphasizes rigorous training, stimulates creativity, builds self-confidence, and adds a dimension of beauty to their lives. HSA achieves its Mission on-site at The Herb Alpert Center by offering high quality, affordable, arts training in dance, music, theatre, and visual art to ethnically and socio-economically diverse young people aged 2-18; by providing financial aid and merit scholarships to those who need it most; and by developing key partnerships with other cultural institutions, colleges/universities, and conservatories to prepare our aspiring pre-professional students at the highest possible level.

About the Herb Alpert Foundation:
The Herb Alpert Foundation’s mission is to create and support the mechanisms and means through which young people can discover, harness and fully develop their unique creative energies and their special talents; To prepare young people to live free from prejudice so that they can be enriched through incorporating diverse people and perspectives into their worldview and life experience; To nurture a capacity for empathy and compassion so that the relationships we develop through our lives are based on mutual respect, tolerance and kindness.

]]>Tue, 25 Apr 2017 06:21:00 +0000Wynton Marsalis, Jon Batiste and members of the JLCO release Spotify Singleshttp://wyntonmarsalis.org/news/entry/wynton-marsalis-jon-batiste-and-members-of-the-jlco-release-spotify-singles
wynton_news_16382Wynton Marsalis, Jon Batiste and members of the Jazz at Lincoln Center Orchestra released two tracks exclusively for the Spotify Singles series today. The tracks “2 Degrees East, 3 Degrees West” and “Django” are streaming now and are available to all users. To stream the Spotify Singles, go to http://bit.ly/2o3kRYh

Both songs were recorded live on March 6, 2017 at Spotify Studio in New York City. Marsalis and Batiste originally recorded takes of both songs with the Jazz at Lincoln Center Orchestra for The Music of John Lewis, the newly released album on Blue Engine Records.

Launched in 2016, Spotify Singles provide artists the opportunity and space to create and perform content in the state-of-the-art Spotify Studio.

Check out a behind-scenes-look at the Spotify Singles recording session:

The Music of John Lewis, released on March 24, 2017, marks the first recording featuring Wynton Marsalis and Jon Batiste, two longtime collaborators and New Orleans natives. The album was recorded in 2013, when the Jazz at Lincoln Center Orchestra with Wynton Marsalis set out to celebrate the esteemed pianist and composer, and teamed up with Batiste. The bandleader of The Late Show with Stephen Colbert and a prodigious pianist in his own right, Batiste joined the Jazz at Lincoln Center Orchestra to tackle some of Lewis’s most iconic tunes during a sold-out concert in Rose Theater, the House of Swing.

The Music of John Lewis debuted at #3 on the Billboard Current Traditional Jazz Albums chart on week of release and is currently at #7 on the JazzWeek radio chart.

Few musicians captured the sleek, swinging sophistication of jazz better than pianist, composer, and bandleader John Lewis, who had a long, deep, personal relationship with Jazz at Lincoln Center. “He used to always call our program a miracle,” says Wynton Marsalis. “He used to always say, ‘Keep that miracle going.’”

]]>Wed, 19 Apr 2017 19:47:00 +0000From one drummer to another, a celebration of Buddy Richhttp://wyntonmarsalis.org/news/entry/from-one-drummer-to-another-a-celebration-of-buddy-rich
wynton_news_16363Drummer Buddy Rich was one of the great virtuosos in jazz, on any instrument. But ask drummer Ali Jackson about Rich and it’s not the late musician’s blazing technique he focuses on. Rather, it’s Rich’s extraordinary range, as musician and showman. “He played in so many contexts, from vaudeville [as a child star with his family] to swing and the big band era, to bebop and everything else.” His lifelong fame — which included a long association with Frank Sinatra and many appearances on Johnny Carson’s “Tonight Show” — made Rich (who died 30 years ago this month at the age of 70) one of the last of a generation of jazz-musician pop stars. “He’s the true popular drummer of America,” says Jackson.

Fitchburg native Rick Stepton, who played lead trombone with Rich on and off throughout the latter part of the bandleader’s career, beginning in 1968, concurs. “Buddy could do it all,” says Stepton. “He was no Duke Ellington, that’s for sure,” but as a popular star, Rich “transcended Gene Krupa, who was Mr. Popular before him,” even playing rock venues in the late ’60s. The drawing power was based on the high-energy precision of his bands (Rich was a famously uncompromising, hot-tempered taskmaster), sparkling arrangements, and, of course, his incendiary solos. Stepton cites fans of Rich such as Elvin Jones, Dizzy Gillespie, and Miles Davis, all of whom were regular attendees at Rich’s shows. Davis, according to Stepton, put Rich in the realm of modern drum master and Boston native Tony Williams, (who happened to be a member of Davis’s own band), saying, “If Tony Williams or Buddy Rich can’t do it, it can’t be done.”

On Sunday, Jackson will perform at Symphony Hall, in a Celebrity Series of Boston concert, with Wynton Marsalis and the Jazz at Lincoln Center Orchestra, in a program called “Buddy Rich Centennial: Celebrating the Jazz Drum.” The first half of the program, curated by Jackson, will cover the full range of Rich’s work, from his small-group recordings with the likes of Nat King Cole, Lester Young, and Charlie Parker, to performances with Harry James and Ella Fitzgerald, to some of his own big band’s staples, like Phil Wilson’s “Basically the Blues,” a supercharged version of Eubie Blake’s “Bugle Call Rag,” and Ellington’s “Cottontail.”

The second half of the program will feature Jackson’s own extended work, “Living Grooves: A World in Jazz Rhythm,” which will pay tribute to Rich in part by encompassing the entire history of the music, from field chants and West African and Afro-Latin rhythms through the various permutations of swing. It will reveal Jackson as something Buddy Rich was not: a composer.

“He’s so attuned to his past and the history of jazz and of music,” says Hope Boykin, a dancer and choreographer with Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater who has collaborated with Jackson. On April 29, the Ailey troupe will present the Boston premiere of Boykin’s
“r-Evolution, Dream,” with music by Jackson, a piece inspired by the speeches and sermons of Martin Luther King Jr.

Boykin says she and Jackson worked on “r-Evolution, Dream” from scratch. “He’s my first call, all the time,” she says. “He understands dance, and he understands me.”

Jackson’s musical history with Marsalis, Jazz at Lincoln Center’s managing and artistic director, is not atypical. Like scores of other musicians, he was “discovered” by Marsalis, at a school event, back in Detroit. By 18, he was playing with the trumpeter and Pulitzer Prize-winning composer. A longtime member of Marsalis’s small bands, he’s been a member of JLCO since 2005.

So what’s been his biggest lesson from Marsalis? “The incredible work ethic,” says Jackson. “He’s just serious, all the time, especially when it comes to music.” He cites Marsalis’s consistency over a long period, in many roles — trumpeter, bandleader, composer, artistic director. “It’s just rare in any field,” says Jackson. “I’ve watched this guy write a symphony in a car, traveling all over the country. I mean, who does that?” It’s the kind of work ethic that even Buddy Rich might appreciate.

Appearing on “CBS This Morning” Monday, the Grammy- and Pulitzer Prize-winning musician and composer was asked by co-host Norah O’Donnell the effect of President Trump’s budget proposal, which would shut down the National Endowment for the Arts, the National Endowment for the Humanities and the Corporation for Public Broadcasting as well as eliminate $1.2 billion in before- and after-school and summer programs.

“There’s so much wrong with so much that’s going on in our politics, not just directed at him,” Marsalis said. “We’re swinging back and forth like a ship listing in the ocean. Your national budget is symbolic. You’re basically telling the world, ‘This is what we as a nation think about our arts,’ which is our collective memory, our wisdom.

“There’s a reality to things: When we tell people our arts are not important, our wisdom is not important, we’re preparing our public to be more ignorant so that we can exploit them more.

“We’re going to realize that white and black people of a certain economic level, there’s a certain level of exploitation that’s taking place as intellectuals. So you don’t want to disconnect yourself from your intellectual tradition in any way.

“It’s painful to see it. It’s not just painful, it’s ignorant. We don’t want to be viewed in the world that way.”

Marsalis, who is the managing and co-artistic director of Jazz at Lincoln Center, appeared on “CBS This Morning” to talk about his latest album, “The Music of John Lewis” (Blue Engine Records), a tribute to the late pianist, composer and bandleader of the Modern Jazz Quartet. Marsalis collaborated with Jon Batiste, the bandleader for “The Late Show with Stephen Colbert.”

In 1984, Charlie Rose asked Marsalis about the level of respect paid to musicians in the jazz world compared to other genres. “Most people would say that we have not recognized the genius of jazz musicians primarily because 90 percent of them were black,” Rose said.

“Right. I don’t really think that we even approach it, recognizing it,” Marsalis replied. “I have to answer truthfully, I don’t think so.”

Thirty-three years later, Marsalis says, “A lot has changed since then. A lot of change on the scene, a lot more younger musicians, and much more music available.”

He credits “the momentum of the music” as well as the work of Jazz at Lincoln Center for changes in jazz’s acceptance since his 1984 interview with Rose.

“We still tour around the world and we collaborate with a lot of musicians,” he said. “But also, the music is difficult to play, so there’s always a lot of younger musicians that want to play it. Which is what Jon represents and what he presents on this album is that the quality of playing has gone up for younger musicians.”

Batiste, a pianist and composer, knew Marsalis since he was a teenager. (“I was 13 years old. We actually would play basketball before we started playing music together. He had a nice J!”)

“He called, and when you get a 30-year veteran from Kenner, Louisiana, call you up — this was in 2013 — to do the music of John Lewis, one of the most venerable, highest-level jazz composers and piano players, I had to say yes.

“It’s a challenge,” Batiste said of the album. “It’s an artistic Mount Everest to climb.

“The music, I feel, is about bridging the gap between the generations. It’s about sharing and breaking barriers that may be color barriers, may be racial barriers, or may be something about the older generation feels like, ‘What you all doing is not happening,’ and the younger generation is like, ‘What you all doing is passé. We don’t need that.’ When actually, jazz is not like that at all.”

“John Lewis, as erudite as he was and as serious as he was about music and the quality of his playing, I knew Jon would be up to the intellectual study,” Marsalis said.

Marsalis, who is 55, described the generational relationship he has with the 30-year-old Batiste.

“It’s almost like being in the same family,” he said. “My father [Ellis Marsalis] would be like a grandparent to Jon. He taught Harry Connick Jr., all of us in that generation and even in the later generation with Jon. The second he started playing, I get a call from my father saying, ‘Little Batiste can play!’”

]]>Mon, 03 Apr 2017 14:22:00 +0000Wynton Marsalis’ 12 Tips on How to Practice: For Musicians, Athletes, or Anyone Who Wants to Learnhttp://wyntonmarsalis.org/news/entry/wynton-marsalis-12-tips-on-how-to-practice-for-musicians-athletes-anyone
wynton_news_16368Practicing for countless hours before we can be good at something seems burdensome and boring. Maybe that’s why we’re drawn to stories of instant achievement. The monk realizes satori (and Neo learns kung fu); the superhero acquires great power out of the blue; Robert Johnson trades for genius at the crossroads. At the same time, we teach children they can’t master a skill without discipline and diligence. We repeat pop psych theories that specify the exact number hours required for excellence. The number may be arbitrary, but it comforts us to believe that practice might, eventually, make perfect. Because in truth we know there is no way around it. As Wynton Marsalis writes in Wynton’s Twelve Ways to Practice: From Music to Schoolwork, “practice is essential to learning music—and anything else, for that matter.” (Published in the Education Digest | Sept 1996 ; also appearing in Marsalis On MusicDVD and book companion)

For jazz musicians, the time spent learning theory and refining technique finds eloquent expression in the concept of woodshedding, a “humbling but necessary chore,” writes Paul Klemperer at Big Apple Jazz, “like chopping wood before you can start the fire.”

Yet retiring to the woodshed “means more than just practicing…. You have to dig deep into yourself, discipline yourself, become focused on the music and your instrument.” As beginners, we tend to look at practice only as a chore. The best jazz musicians know there’s also “something philosophical, almost religious” about it. John Coltrane, for example, practiced ceaselessly, consciously defining his music as a spiritual and contemplative discipline.

Marsalis also implies a religious aspect in his short article: “when you practice, it means you are willing to sacrifice to sound good… I like to say that the time spent practicing is the true sign of virtue in a musician.” Maybe this piety is intended to dispel the myth of quick and easy deals with infernal entities. But most of Marsalis’ “twelve ways to practice” are as pragmatic as they come, and “will work,” he promises “for almost every activity—from music to schoolwork to sports.” Find his abridged list below, and read his full commentary at “the trumpeter’s bible,” Arban’s Method.

Seek out instruction: A good teacher will help you understand the purpose of practicing and can teach you ways to make practicing easier and more productive.

Write out a schedule: A schedule helps you organize your time. Be sure to allow time to review the fundamentals because they are the foundation of all the complicated things that come later.

Set goals: Like a schedule, goals help you organize your time and chart your progress…. If a certain task turns out to be really difficult, relax your goals: practice doesnʼt have to be painful to achieve results.

Concentrate: You can do more in 10 minutes of focused practice than in an hour of sighing and moaning. This means no video games, no television, no radio, just sitting still and working…. Concentrated effort takes practice too, especially for young people.

Relax and practice slowly: Take your time; donʼt rush through things. Whenever you set out to learn something new – practicing scales, multiplication tables, verb tenses in Spanish – you need to start slowly and build up speed.

Practice hard things longer: Donʼt be afraid of confronting your inadequacies; spend more time practicing what you canʼt do…. Successful practice means coming face to face with your shortcomings. Donʼt be discouraged; youʼll get it eventually.

Practice with expression: Every day you walk around making yourself into “you,” so do everything with the proper attitude…. Express your “style” through how you do what you do.

Learn from your mistakes: None of us are perfect, but donʼt be too hard on yourself. If you drop a touchdown pass, or strike out to end the game, itʼs not the end of the world. Pick yourself up, analyze what went wrong and keep going….

Donʼt show off: Itʼs hard to resist showing off when you can do something well…. But my father told me, “Son, those who play for applause, thatʼs all they get.” When you get caught up in doing the tricky stuff, youʼre just cheating yourself and your audience.

Think for yourself: Your success or failure at anything ultimately depends on your ability to solve problems, so donʼt become a robot…. Thinking for yourself helps develop your powers of judgment.

Be optimistic: Optimism helps you get over your mistakes and go on to do better. It also gives you endurance because having a positive attitude makes you feel that something great is always about to happen.

Look for connections: If you develop the discipline it takes to become good at something, that discipline will help you in whatever else you do…. The more you discover the relationships between things that at first seem different, the larger your world becomes. In other words, the woodshed can open up a whole world of possibilities.

You’ll note in even a cursory scan of Marsalis’ prescriptions that they begin with the imminently practical—the “chores” we can find tedious—and move further into the intangibles: developing creativity, humility, optimism, and, eventually, maybe, a gradual kind of enlightenment. You’ll notice on a closer read that the consciousness-raising and the mundane daily tasks go hand-in-hand.

While this may be all well and good for jazz musicians, students, athletes, or chess players, we may have reason for skepticism about success through practice more generally. Researchers at Princeton have found, for example, that the effectiveness of practice is “domain dependent.” In games, music, and sports, practice accounts for a good deal of improvement. In certain other “less stable” fields driven by celebrity and networking, for example, success can seem more dependent on personality or privileged access.

But it’s probably safe to assume that if you’re reading this post, you’re interested in mastering a skill, not cultivating a brand. Whether you want to play Carnegie Hall or “learn a language, cook good meals or get along well with people,” practice is essential, Marsalis argues, and practicing well is just as important as practicing often. For a look at how practice changes our brains, creating what we colloquially call “muscle memory,” see this TED-Ed video.

]]>Mon, 03 Apr 2017 14:21:00 +0000Marsalis on Marsalishttp://wyntonmarsalis.org/news/entry/marsalis-on-marsalis
wynton_news_16344A signal event in the Juilliard concert schedule is coming up shortly: on April 6, the Juilliard Jazz Orchestraplays the music of Wynton Marsalis (‘81, trumpet) at Alice Tully Hall, conducted by the composer himself.

The shortest distance between two points is a straight line, and following that dictum, the Juilliard Jazz Orchestra is a direct legatee of the greatest jazz orchestra in American history—Duke Ellington’s.

How did this occur? We had to look no further than Marsalis himself, the director of Juilliard Jazz, who decades ago heeded the advice of one of his mentors, jazz giant Dizzy Gillespie. As Marsalis assumed the leadership of Jazz at Lincoln Center, the young trumpeter struggled with the challenge of maintaining his famous septet along with creating a big band. Gillespie’s reply was as spartan as it was definitive: “One should not consider it an achievement to lose one’s orchestral tradition,” Marsalis recalled in a recent conversation with The Journal.

“When we started the band it was with a lot of the surviving members of the Ellington band, including clarinetist Jimmy Hamilton, trumpeters Clark Terry and Willie Cook, and trombonist Britt Woodman,” Marsalis said. “Baritone saxophonist [and late Juilliard faculty member] Joe Temperley was the holdover and became the root of the new band I began to form—keeping that Ellingtonian spirit alive and thriving. Many of the players in my septet then were from New Orleans and we had a family type of vibe. Growing up into jazz with my father [Ellis Marsalis], I always liked the feeling of the music and the musicians and how we treat each other,” he added. “The type of soul and the love and the vibration we had is really what the music is, and we maintain that tradition.”

The transition to the band as it today, Marsalis explained, “began when everybody began to write music for the band and, importantly, teach. We were so happy when younger musicians that we had taught began to come into the band, like Walter Blanding, Carlos Henriquez, and Chris Crenshaw.”

A hallmark of Marsalis’s evolution as a composer has been his willingness to write music for ensembles ranging from the smallest to the largest. When asked which comes first, the compositional germ or the assignment, he replied, “When I know what the instrumentation is, then I start to shape the ideas for that instrumentation. But at that point the ideas are not even music yet, they’re just ideas. Once I get the form in order, then I go back into where the ideas are and tailor them for the ensemble,” he said. “Every time I write something, I try and learn something different—new ways of doing things, new harmonic progressions, voicings—all in order to become more adept.”

From the abstract world of compositional imperatives, Marsalis quickly modulated into the practical goals he has in place for the Juilliard Jazz program in general, and specifically for the Juilliard Jazz Orchestra. “We want them to learn the Ellingtonian principles, to work together, how to lead and how to follow, how to play with a great dynamic range, how to develop an overview that includes other people, how to make the transition from big band to a small band and back,” he said. “First and foremost, at the same time, to develop a comprehensive understanding of our music.”

Marsalis chose the program for the April 6 concert “to present a challenge to the players, each one has a different kind of difficulty, another sense of timbral color, of what a big band can accomplish,” he said. It covers a wide range of Marsalis masterpieces, with selections from his albums Jump Start, Congo Square, Vitoria Suite, the Pulitzer-winning Blood on the Fields, and Big Train. The program is fully in keeping with the ultimate goal Marsalis has in mind for the Juilliard Jazz students. “We want to train the finest musicians that we can train and give them the tools to develop into leaders, people who can come in to communities and have a positive effect with the music.”

You’ll hear all that turned into rhythm, melody, and harmony—plus a lot of swing—on April 6.

]]>Fri, 31 Mar 2017 18:51:00 +0000Abu Dhabi Festival 2017: trumpeter Wynton Marsalis on preserving jazz as ‘America’s classical musichttp://wyntonmarsalis.org/news/entry/abu-dhabi-festival-2017-trumpeter-wynton-marsalis-on-preserving-jazz
wynton_news_16334Spoiler alert: Wynton Marsalis suffers for his art, too. On the surface, the American trumpeter appears the very epitome of composure and professionalism – a superhuman mix of slick self-confidence and no-nonsense determination. A man who still irons his suits and copies his own sheet music by hand. A musician whose lightning virtuosity you expect to be credited to nothing but hard work.

Yet Marsalis – who performs at Emirates Palace tonight as part of Abu Dhabi Festival – bristles at the idea that the tortured artist myth, so beloved by jazz fans, might not apply to him.

“Everybody on Earth suffers. You could tell me some stories – man my mouth might be hanging off: ‘Shoot, you dealt with that?’,” he proclaims, in a booming baritone.

“That’s your personal life. We are all dealing … I dealt with problems I had, I’m dealing with.”

I point out as delicately as possible, combating the sound of wailing sirens down the line from New York City, that the whole purpose of our conversation is for me to try to figure out exactly what kind of person Marsalis is.

“Listen to my music. I have a lot of records – it is all in there,” he replies.

“I’ve got stuff – I just don’t whine and cry about stuff that happened. Now I’m 55, I’m not a boy, I’ve been out here a long time.”

On this, it is impossible to argue. Marsalis has a lot of records – dozens of them – spread over a 35-year career, during which he has enjoyed a higher public profile than any jazz musician of his generation.

There’s a Pulitzer – the first awarded to a jazz musician – nine Grammys and 29 honorary degrees.

He has also helmed Jazz at Lincoln Centre for 20 years – the New York performance complex, educational programme and its resident big band – which has done much to preserve and present the genre as “America’s classical music”.

Such a role carries enormous influence, but leaves the trumpeter wide open to criticism that he is mummifying the art form.

Marsalis is a notorious conservative who is generally of the opinion that the evolution of jazz should have been frozen sometime in the mid-1960s, before electronic instruments and rock backbeats began incestuously blaspheming its acoustic, swinging roots.

At times, such outspoken opinions have risked overshadowing the music. After signing with the major label CBS at 20, Marsalis enjoyed unprecedented marketing exposure for a jazz act of any age, and in interviews, the young firebrand was ever happy to pour scorn on his contemporaries and elders alike.

“It was philosophical,” says Marsalis of those early days. “Because I was demanding a certain level of integrity at a time of corruption – there’s nobody who will be more self-righteous than somebody who’s lying,” he adds, breaking into fits of laughter.

“Sometimes, they have to remind themselves that they’re lying.”

Marsalis’s musical conservatism may be legendary, but it is only after talking to him at length that its depth truly becomes clear. This purism is not a mindset or aesthetic preference, more of a quasi-religious belief. Time and again throughout our interview, the word “corruption” comes up in relation to music.

Are things, then, any less corrupt today?

“Man, you know what’s going on is corrupt – most people are trying to figure out how to be higher up the food chain instead of playing,” he replies.

“I realised as I got older that – propaganda – it is always an uphill struggle … it doesn’t matter what time you’re in, the times are the times.”

Most people would say it is a boom time for jazz right now. Artists such as Robert Glasper and Kamasi Washington have crossed over to hip-hop, revitalising the genre for a new generation. It may not be Marsalis’s taste, but surely if it leads kids back to the source – jazz à la Wynton – there’s no way that’s a bad thing.

“It is not a matter of bad – first of all, I taught Robert Glasper when he was in high school. I was at his wedding,” notes Marsalis.

“Whether I’m dismissive of people or not, for me the source is the source, you don’t need to go through something else to find it – to me that’s the value of education. I don’t need to look at a pornographic video to get to a movie.”

What also becomes clear after talking to Marsalis is not just the depth of his conservatism, but its source. He grew up in jazz’s birthplace New Orleans, the son of pianist Ellis Marsalis Jr.

Early gigs included touring with drummer Art Blakey and mentor Herbie Hancock – dream gigs for any young player today – which Marsalis describes not as goosebump-inducing early breaks, but as mere inevitability. “I was the only person I knew who wanted to play that music,” he says.

Marsalis is a believer in the freedom jazz represents, often drawing parallels between jazz and democracy – the idea of collective improvisation akin to equal self-determination.

So if jazz is corrupt, where does that leave democracy in the US today?

“It is in a good place,” he says. “People came out and voted – voting means you have to get your people out, you have to participate – and if you don’t, you don’t.”

Wynton Marsalis has an active twitter account and is sharing some of his rehearsal sessions for Abu Dhabi Festival.

]]>Sun, 26 Mar 2017 14:19:00 +0000Jon Batiste and Wynton Marsalis Prize John Lewis, and Each Otherhttp://wyntonmarsalis.org/news/entry/jon-batiste-and-wynton-marsalis-prize-john-lewis-and-each-other
wynton_news_16332By the time Jon Batiste arrived at Spotify’s studios near Union Square on a recent evening, the trumpeter Wynton Marsalis had commandeered his seat at the piano.

Mr. Batiste, who had hustled across town after taping that day’s episode of “The Late Show,” where he is Stephen Colbert’s musical foil, went around the room dapping and high-fiving the other band members as they rehearsed a blues. Then he stationed himself beside Mr. Marsalis, watching as the elder musician plunked out a playful solo.

It was a Monday in early March, and the two jazz luminaries — separated by a generation — were there with a handful of members of Mr. Marsalis’s Jazz at Lincoln Center Orchestra to record two bonus tracks for “The Music of John Lewis.” (The tracks will be available only on Spotify.) The album, which comes out on Friday, features a 16-piece configuration of the orchestra, with Mr. Batiste joining as a special guest.

Every tune and nearly all the arrangements were written by John Lewis, who died in 2001 and is best known as the pianist and musical director for the Modern Jazz Quartet. In the 1950s that group became one of the first jazz bands to play for concert-hall audiences around the world. Mr. Lewis wrote elegant, epigrammatic compositions that integrated the counterpoint of chamber music into a hard-bop framework. And as the new album testifies, his compact motifs and pithy, swinging approach hold up strikingly well in large-ensemble arrangements.

In the 1980s Mr. Marsalis led a bumper crop of young jazz traditionalists seeking to enshrine straight-ahead, early-to-mid-20th-century jazz in the American canon. Much of what they celebrated — aesthetic refinement; swing rhythm; sophisticated, blues-based improvising — was at the core of the Modern Jazz Quartet’s identity.

Mr. Batiste has emerged in the past two years, thanks to his role as the leader of “The Late Show” band, as one of the most visible jazz musicians of his generation. As such, both Lewis and Mr. Marsalis are beacons for him.

After the session, the two men found a quiet room off the studio to chat. Both come from esteemed musical families in New Orleans, and they have known each other since Mr. Batiste was a teenager. They discussed their hometown, Mr. Lewis’s influence and bringing jazz to the masses. These are edited excerpts from that conversation.

I know you two have a longstanding relationship. Jon, tell me how important Wynton Marsalis was to your development.

JONBATISTE Just the example he set, I came here at 17 to go to Juilliard, same as him. Seeing how he was able to create a path for himself, putting the music and his philosophy of the music and the vision of all his mentors — Albert Murray, Stanley Crouch — into an institution, and bringing that to life on the bandstand, and hundreds of records. It’s legendary, and he ain’t even done yet.

You both come from deep musical families. Wynton, did you know Jon when he was growing up?

WYNTONMARSALIS I knew his family. His family’s famous in New Orleans.

BATISTE I almost see our families as village elders. His dad, Ellis Marsalis; Alvin Batiste; Edward “Kidd” Jordan; Clyde Kerr. It seems like you’ve got four or five musicians who taught the last generations of musicians out of New Orleans. Forty years of musicians, and we’ve got the same elders. It’s almost like an oral tradition is passed down.

MARSALIS We’re from that tribe. And it was a struggle. I always want to make this clear about my father, James Black, Alvin Batiste: They struggled. They were like voices in the wilderness. So I represented them, and then when I would see Bat when he was a kid, 12 or 13, I can’t explain the love I had for him. Because we’re from that same tribe, and it’s familial, you know?

John Lewis had a special relationship with Lincoln Center. I’m sure he inspired a lot of the work that the orchestra continues to do.

MARSALIS I used to go to his house all the time. That was my man. We started to play duo gigs, just me and him. He was a man of tremendous dignity, intelligence. And he really prepared for concerts. He believed in music. It didn’t matter what the environment was.

The Modern Jazz Quartet started when John Lewis replaced Thelonious Monk in Dizzy Gillespie’s big band, and then its four members broke away to form their own group. Jon, to me, Monk and Lewis are two of the clearest influences on your style, even though their playing is so different. Can you talk about how both of them have influenced your playing?

BATISTE Logic. I think about the intensity of logic that John Lewis and Thelonious Monk played with. I actually went one year straight almost exclusively listening to Thelonious Monk. When I was 19 I discovered it, and it’s kind of like the feeling of building a computer, and then finding that somebody already built the computer that you’re envisioning building, but better. And they did it 30 years ago. So I had this idea of playing with a certain spatial awareness, and a balance in the rhythm, and remembering your themes and bringing things back in obtuse ways. Those are all elements of John Lewis and Thelonious Monk’s playing, in different ways.

Wynton, how can you describe the influence of the Modern Jazz Quartet on your work?

MARSALIS What Jon was saying: the spatial layout of the music, how he dealt with his thematic development. That’s the thing that’s most interesting. And how he created diversity. He liked diversity in dynamics, changes in keys. And he liked the soft dynamic. He’d say, “If you start off too loud, you can’t converse.” It’s much easier to cuss and scream than it is to converse. And when you see how democracy is breaking down now, you can see how. And I don’t mean just now. I mean, it’s been breaking down for the past 40 or 50 years.

That in large part is what he was talking about: the type of integrity required to maintain a dialogue with someone who does not think like you. And the type of integrity and discipline you have to have to look at another person whose point of view is the opposite of yours, and have the respect to hear them.

Even within that quartet’s members, you had that dynamic.

MARSALIS Yeah, him and Milt Jackson. Connie Kay, too.

Jon, your main job these days is on “The Late Show.” Are there ways in which you’re able to bring some of these ideas about what the music represents to your work on TV?

BATISTE Something that I think about all the time is the creative license that I’ve been given, to play a range of music — even if it’s just for five to 10 seconds. I think about, who are you playing for in the next generation? You’re exposing this music to people, 3 million, 4 million people at a time. You don’t know who’s listening. And you can make connections that might go over most people’s heads, but somebody out there is hearing it.

I did a few arrangements of Mozart’s “Requiem” recently. I played some of the Debussy piano preludes with a Mardi Gras Indian beat behind it. We play everything, man. It’s a range of music, because it’s a range of people who come through the show. It’s been remarkable to think about how much of the world I’m able to interact with and engage with. When you hear the stuff that we’re playing, it’s not traditional by any stretch. And I think it’s beautiful that they’re giving me the license to just do that, and supporting that.

]]>Fri, 24 Mar 2017 07:22:00 +0000Wynton Marsalis and JLCO colleagues swing their own tunes at Symphony Centerhttp://wyntonmarsalis.org/news/entry/wynton-marsalis-jlco-colleagues-swing-their-own-tunes-at-symphony-center
wynton_news_16304We’ve known for a long time that the Jazz at Lincoln Center Orchestra stands as an ensemble of virtuosos.

But that term generally refers to the level at which musicians play their instruments. In the case of the JLCO members, though, it also signifies the way they wield their pens.

The program that brought the band to Orchestra Hall at Symphony Center on Wednesday evening cast a welcome spotlight on how these artists compose. For the repertoire did not feature the acknowledged masterpieces and forgotten treasures at which this organization long has excelled but, instead, works written by its versatile personnel.

That’s a far distance from the program the band played during its first appearance in Orchestra Hall, nearly a quarter-century ago in September 1992. On that night, what was then called the Lincoln Center Jazz Orchestra — making its Chicago debut on its first national tour — offered an all-Ellington program exploring various facets of the master’s wide-ranging art.

Since then, the band has established itself as the world’s pre-eminent large jazz ensemble, and music director Wynton Marsalis has encouraged his colleagues to add to its book. The value of that approach was apparent throughout an appearance that crowded Orchestra Hall, the large audience accommodated via the terrace seating behind the stage (though when the band plays the more typical Friday-night installments of Symphony Center’s jazz series, extra seats on stage usually are required).

The evening’s tour de force came from the vivid imagination of trombonist-composer Chris Crenshaw, whose “Pursuit of the New Thing” was drawn from his aptly named suite, “The Fifties — A Prism.” Each movement of the work illuminates a particular sound of that fertile decade in American music, the “New Thing” finale addressing the innovations of alto saxophonist Ornette Coleman.

Yes, you could hear the longing blues sensibility that coursed through many of Coleman’s melodic lines and the nonchordal, profoundly linear way of structuring music that defined Coleman’s “harmolodic” methods (a self-styled idiom that was as widely reviled at the time as it is broadly revered today). But Crenshaw extended that philosophy across an orchestral palette, at the same time handing considerable musical responsibility to alto saxophonist Ted Nash and trumpeter Marsalis.

Without mimicking the work of Coleman and trumpeter Don Cherry (who revolutionized jazz in the late 1950s alongside bassist Charlie Haden, drummer Billy Higgins and others), Nash and Marsalis captured the freewheeling sense of melody-making and stop-start rhythmic elasticity of Coleman’s syntax. The orchestral interruptions and interlocutions added to the elements of surprise, which were ample. So much so that some in the audience applauded more than once for what they understandably believed to be the end of a composition/improvisation that was not yet finished.

For those who lament that jazz today lacks humor, Crenshaw’s “New Thing” argued deftly to the contrary. A spirit of subterfuge and comic timing drove a great deal of this piece, as did its poetic lyricism. Perhaps only two musicians who have worked together as long as Marsalis and Nash could have played this cat-and-mouse game so nimbly.

Nash, who recently won two Grammy Awards for music from his “Presidential Suite” (recorded by the Ted Nash Big Band), led the JLCO in the work’s “Jawaharlal Nehru” movement. The composer explained that he crafted its themes to reflect the tonal inflections and cadences of Nehru’s vocal delivery, and indeed its incantatory nature and narrow pitch range evoked human speech. But the movement’s shimmering ensemble colors and slow-but-sustained orchestral crescendo proved equally compelling, attesting to Nash’s translucent way of writing for large ensemble.

Among the evening’s other highlights: the slashing brass lines of a Marsalis “Offertory” from his “The Abyssinian Mass” (one of the best recordings of last year); the gorgeous reed-choir writing of bassist Carlos Henriquez’s “The Bronx Pyramid”; and a tender evocation of classic Dizzy Gillespie in Vincent Gardner’s “Ooh-Yadoodle-E-Blu For Me and You” (which closed with hypnotic orchestral vocal chant).

JLCO reedist Victor Goines, who’s also director of jazz studies at Northwestern University’s Bienen School of Music, gave the evening its most vivid passages of romance in “The ‘It’ Thing” from his “Untamed Elegance” suite. To hear Goines’ long, plush strands of melody on tenor saxophone set against a softly nocturnal orchestral backdrop was to realize, anew, the singularity of what these musicians can articulate in sound.

The Jazz at Lincoln Center Orchestra will collaborate with the Chicago Symphony Orchestra in new arrangements of Mussorgsky’s “Pictures at an Exhibition” at 8 p.m. Friday at Symphony Center, 220 S. Michigan Ave.; phone 312-294-3000 or go to www.cso.org

]]>Thu, 02 Mar 2017 22:42:00 +0000Jazz at Lincoln Center announces 2017-18 seasonhttp://wyntonmarsalis.org/news/entry/jazz-at-lincoln-center-announces-2017-18-season
wynton_news_16290Jazz at Lincoln Center and Managing and Artistic Director Wynton Marsalis announced its 2017-18 season, which marks the organization’s 30th anniversary. The season includes 30 unique concert programs comprised of over 90 performances in Rose Theater and The Appel Room, more than 350 nights of music in Dizzy’s Club Coca-Cola, and a diverse and extensive range of education and community programs for all ages. Jazz at Lincoln Center’s 30th anniversary season is anchored by the exceptional Jazz at Lincoln Center Orchestra with Wynton Marsalis (JLCO), with performances that salute living legends of jazz and showcase its rising stars. The season concludes with a grand finale world premiere composition by Wynton Marsalis.

In celebration of the universal language of music and the influence of jazz in present day, Jazz at Lincoln Center’s 2017-18 programs will bring together a wide array of virtuoso musicians and composers illustrating the collaborative nature of the art form. Key performances include celebrations of:

Classical music with a tribute to American composer, conductor, author and pianist Leonard Bernstein at 100 and a special appearance by the Harlem Quartet in Eddie Daniels & Ted Nash: Jazz Meets Classical;

Since the first downbeat of its summer concert series in 1987, Jazz at Lincoln Center has been a vital part of the New York cultural landscape. Jazz at Lincoln Center was established as an independent non-profit organization in 1996; opened Frederick P. Rose Hall, the “House of Swing”, in 2004; and launched Blue Engine Records to share its vast archive of recordings in 2014. Over the past three decades, Jazz at Lincoln Center has become an important advocate for jazz, culture, and arts education globally. Key milestones in Jazz at Lincoln Center’s 30 year history include:

A global audience of nearly 2 million people of all ages and experiences through concerts, webcasting, musical instruction and distribution of music scores, the vast majority of which is free of charge;

More than 648,280 participants in the Essentially Ellington program, including the JLCO’s own Carlos Henriquez;

Online viewership of more than 330,000 people from more than 150 countries since the launch of the free concert webcast series during the 25th anniversary season;

Over 148,000 students in the last year were a part of Jazz at Lincoln Center’s education programs, many of whom had no other access to quality music education;

More than 1,200 original concerts in the New York City area;

Tours in over 446 cities in 41 countries on five continents.

“Throughout history, jazz musicians have inspired and have been inspired by many art forms to create new works and express cultural statements. For 30 years, Jazz at Lincoln Center has continued that tradition through our programs. Today, we remain committed to jazz which reveals the best of American culture with its virtuosity, diversity, soulfulness, and an embracing spirit under all circumstances,” says Managing and Artistic Director Wynton Marsalis. “Our new season will reflect on the versatility of jazz. We’ll illustrate the power of music and literature as Fred Hersch, Kurt Elling and Kate McGarry perform Hersch’s compositions inspired by Walt Whitman’s Leaves of Grass. We will illuminate the rich fabric of world music and jazz as 2017 NEA Jazz Master Dave Holland collaborates with Indian music superstars Zakir Hussain and Shankar Mahadevan. We will explore the connections between jazz and dance as piano phenomena Joey Alexander, Chano Dominguez, Dick Hyman and Sullivan Fortner meet dance stars Eddie Torres Jr. and Jared Grimes. We will honor two Pulitzer Prize winners on the occasion of the Pulitzer Prize centennial: 2016 winner Henry Threadgill will perform his works and the Jazz at Lincoln Center Orchestra will interpret the music of 2007 winner Ornette Coleman. We’ll celebrate Cuban clarinet virtuoso Paquito D’Rivera who has played an important role in our organization’s history for 25 years. We’ll feature the incredible Jazz at Lincoln Center Orchestra as an achievement and its members as leaders in this music. We invite everyone to join us as we reflect on the achievements of this music and the masters, and nurture the next generation of jazz legends, enthusiasts, and fans.”

Jazz at Lincoln Center’s 30th anniversary season will open on September 14, 2017 (through September 16) with The Fantastic Mr. Jelly Lord, a celebration of New Orleans legend Jelly Roll Morton by the Jazz at Lincoln Center Orchestra with Wynton Marsalis. The band will also present the first-ever The Jazz at Lincoln Center Orchestra Songbook (October 20-21), showcasing some of the JLCO’s best original compositions by GRAMMY Award-winner Ted Nash, Victor Goines, Chris Crenshaw, Carlos Henriquez, and more. The Jazz at Lincoln Center Orchestra will continue to celebrate the jazz tradition with programs that include Benny Goodman: King of Swing (January 11-13), Corea Plays Monk (April 5-7), and Celebrating Ornette Coleman (May 18-19). A favorite holiday tradition, Big Band Holidays (December 13-17), will return with guest vocalists Catherine Russell and Kenny Washington. The season will close with the world premiere of a new work from Wynton Marsalis (June 7-9).

“For this milestone season, we are highlighting the depth and breadth of jazz influence over time, across genres and generations,” says Jason Olaine, Director of Programming and Touring at Jazz at Lincoln Center. “We are honoring traditions and also creating new ones, celebrating Leonard Bernstein’s centennial alongside 30 years of the Jazz at Lincoln Center Orchestra; Dave Douglas playing Dizzy Gillespie; and a whole cross-section of jazz and classical music. The 2017-18 season will be a look back as much as it is a look forward into the next thirty, fifty, and one hundred years of jazz.”

Following the opening weekend, Jazz at Lincoln Center’s 30th season continues in September and October 2017 with performances celebrating the diversity of jazz. Fred Hersch, Kurt Elling and Kate McGarry perform Hersch’s Leaves of Grass (September 15-16), celebrating the life and poetry of the American bard Walt Whitman in The Appel Room. On the occasion of the Pulitzer Prize centennial, Henry Threadgill: The Pulitzer Project (September 22-23) will honor three Afro-American jazz musicians who have won the prestigious prize: Wynton Marsalis, Ornette Coleman, and Threadgill himself. In October, milestone birthday celebrations abound with the 75th birthday of NEA Jazz Master Jack DeJohnette and debut performance of Hudson: Jack DeJohnette, Larry Grenadier, John Medeski, & John Scofield (October 6-7); and the 90th birthday celebration of acclaimed vocalist Marilyn Maye (October 27-28). The Jazz at Lincoln Center Orchestra will present the first-ever The Jazz at Lincoln Center Orchestra Songbook (October 20-21), highlighting the renowned big band’s vast repertoire of original work.

Latin collaborations kick off November 2017, with Nuevo Jazz Latino (November 3-4) in The Appel Room and Eliane Elias: From Bill Evans to Brazil (November 3-4) in Rose Theater. As the arts world celebrates the Leonard Bernstein centennial, the Jazz at Lincoln Center Orchestra will perform Leonard Bernstein at 100 (November 9-11) in Rose Theater. GRAMMY Award-nominated composer and arranger Richard DeRosa will collaborate with JLCO trombonist Vincent Gardner to arrange Bernstein classics like West Side Story and Candide. November also brings the season’s first Family Concert, Who is Benny Goodman? (November 17-18), to Rose Theater as the Jazz at Lincoln Center Orchestra with Wynton Marsalis explores the groundbreaking bandleader who formed the first racially integrated jazz bands recognized by the public and brought them to the country’s most hallowed venues.

Swing and blues fill the halls in December 2017. Saxophone and clarinet virtuosos Peter Anderson and Will Anderson showcase the music and history of The Fabulous Dorsey Brothers (December 1-2), Tommy Dorsey and Jimmy Dorsey, in The Appel Room, while Steve Miller (December 1-2) continues his blues journey by exploring the three essential blues hubs, also known as The Blues Triangle: Memphis, Dallas, and Chicago. December also marks the return of a beloved New York tradition, Big Band Holidays (December 13-17) with the Jazz at Lincoln Center Orchestra with Wynton Marsalis. Jazz royalty Catherine Russell will be the special guest vocalist for the second consecutive year, joined by fellow vocalist Kenny Washington. This holiday tradition has been celebrated in New York City every December for over a decade. In addition, Jazz at Lincoln Center will bring back a Relaxed Performance during the holiday run after the initiative’s successful launch in 2016. The Relaxed Performance is designed to provide families with children or adults with autism, learning difficulties, or other sensory and communication needs the opportunity to enjoy Jazz at Lincoln Center performances in a more comfortable environment.

The first January 2018 performance will honor Benny Goodman: King of Swing (January 11-13) and his legendary 1938 debut performance at Carnegie Hall, an unprecedented presentation of authentic jazz and racial integration on a stage of unparalleled prestige. The “King of Swing” celebrated the music on its own terms, introducing the public to real jazz elements and extensive improvisation during an era fixated on dance music. Under the direction of music director and JLCO member Victor Goines, the concert will also feature guest soloists Anat Cohen, Ken Peplowski and Janelle Reichman. This program will consist entirely of pieces played during that historic event composed by artists including Benny Goodman, Count Basie, Duke Ellington, George Gershwin, Fats Waller, Louis Prima, and more.

Jazz at Lincoln Center’s celebrated Valentine’s weekend tradition returns for its seventh year in February 2018. Dianne Reeves (February 9-10), the five-time GRAMMY Award winner and one of the most recognized voices in music, will fill Rose Theater with songs of love and romance. Dave Douglas returns to The Appel Room with Dave Douglas: Dizzy Atmosphere (February 23-24), a fresh exploration of jazz legend Dizzy Gillespie. Douglas brings with him a roster of talented musicians, including trumpeter and Thelonious Monk Institute International Jazz Competition winner Ambrose Akinmusire in his Jazz at Lincoln Center debut, along with pianist Gerald Clayton, bassist Linda Oh and drummer Joey Baron.

Dance, swing, Latin, and classical music converge across generations in March 2018. Rags, Strides, & Habaneras (March 2-3) will be an audiovisual showcase of music traditions across jazz, Latin jazz, and Spanish-American music, with four renowned pianists — Dick Hyman, Sullivan Fortner, Joey Alexander and Chano Dominguez — and two of New York City’s great dancers — E*ddie Torres, Jr.* and Jared Grimes. NEA Jazz Master, Carnegie Hall Lifetime Achievement Award recipient, and 14-time GRAMMY Award winner Paquito D’ Rivera graces the Rose Theater stage in Paquito D’Rivera: To Bird With Strings (March 16-17), a thoughtfully updated program dedicated to his favorite album, Charlie Parker’s Bird with Strings. The Swing Collective (March 23-24) exemplifies Jazz at Lincoln Center’s commitment to fostering the next generation of diverse talent, representing five countries of origin. The quintet includes Melissa Aldana, the first female (and Chilean) instrumentalist to win the Thelonious Monk Institute International Jazz Competition; Cuban pianist Elio Villafranca; Trinidadian trumpeter and 2015 Guggenheim Fellow Etienne Charles; Japanese bassist Yasushi Nakamura; and American GRAMMY Award-winning drummer, composer, and bandleader Ulysses Owens, Jr. The month of March closes with Michael Feinstein: Celebrating Frank, Dean, & Sammy (March 28-29). Feinstein marks his seventh consecutive year as Director of the Jazz & Popular Song series by celebrating several members of the Rat Pack: Frank Sinatra, Dean Martin, and Sammy Davis, Jr.

Additional highlights in March 2018 include programs that invite audiences of all ages to engage with jazz. Nursery Song Swing (March 9-10) will take place in Rose Theater — the JLCO will demonstrate that jazz can transform any song or melody with rearrangements of childhood favorites such as “Old MacDonald,” “Wheels on the Bus,” and “It’s Not Easy Being Green.” Who is Mary Lou Williams? (March 23-24) is the second Family Concert, an hour-long interactive celebration of composer, arranger and pianist Mary Lou Williams. Through live performances and interactive segments, families will come to understand what makes Williams such an important figure in jazz history. The event will be hosted by LaFrae Scie, a Jazz at Lincoln Center educator, founder and board member of the Willie Mae Rock Camp for Girls, and a New York musician who has been acclaimed for her promotion of jazz and music education.

Jazz at Lincoln Center’s third annual Monk Festival will take place in April 2018. Festival events feature the return of Chick Corea (April 5-7) performing with the Jazz at Lincoln Center Orchestra in Rose Theater, marking the first time the entities will collaborate on the music of Thelonious Monk. For Crescent City Monk with Herlin Riley & Friends (April 6-7), bandleader and drummer Herlin Riley brings Eric “ELEW” Lewis, and NEA Jazz master Ellis Marsalis on piano, as well as saxophonist Todd Williams, bassist Reginald Veal, Cuban percussion genius Pedrito Martinez, and vibraphonist Joel Ross to The Appel Room stage. The final April performance is another dedication to jazz greats: Black, Brown, & Beige & The Best of Basie (April 26-28), wherein the JLCO will perform essential big band music by Duke Ellington and Count Basie.

Performances in May and June 2018 highlight the endless opportunities for diverse collaboration across all disciplines. Michael Feinstein takes The Appel Room stage with two programs, each paying tribute to the greats: The Enchanting Lena Horne (May 2-3) and Swinging with the Count (May 30-31). World music takes the Rose Theater stage with Zakir Hussain and Dave Holland: Cross Currents (May 4-5), featuring four of India’s most progressive musicians: Amit Chatterjee, Louiz Banks, Gino Banks, and composer and vocalist Shankar Mahadevan. This is the group’s first appearance at Jazz at Lincoln Center. The Jazz at Lincoln Center Orchestra then presents Celebrating Ornette Coleman (May 18-19) under the musical direction of JLCO member Ted Nash. Rising star composer and singer Somi makes her Jazz at Lincoln Center debut in Miriam Makeba & Nina Simone: Singing Protest & Memory with Somi (May 18-19). The GRAMMY Award-winning Harlem Quartet will also make its first Jazz at Lincoln Center appearance in Eddie Daniels & Ted Nash: Jazz Meets Classical (June 1-2). In this final Appel Room concert of the season, the GRAMMY Award-winning Nash will debut an original composition and perform new arrangements of pieces by Vivaldi, Bach, and Ravel.

The 2017-18 Season closes with the Jazz at Lincoln Center Orchestra presenting a concert exclusively devoted to the original compositions of Wynton Marsalis (June 7-9), the appropriate grand finale to the 30th anniversary concert season. The centerpiece for the evening will be the world premiere of Marsalis’ new work, the latest entry to his canon of music exploring race in America.

Dizzy’s Club Coca-Cola, one of the three main performance venues of Frederick P. Rose Hall, produces world-class jazz performances nightly, often reflecting and augmenting the programming in Rose Theater and The Appel Room. The Fall 2017 highlights at Dizzy’s Club Coca-Cola include the return of the popular Coca-Cola Generations in Jazz Festival (September 1-October 1) with critically acclaimed 81-year-old pianist Harold Mabern (September 8-10) and San Francisco-based vocalist Mary Stallings (September 21-24). Two memorable nights of music are scheduled in partnership with the Festival of New Trumpet Music (September 11-12). The Dizzy Gillespie centennial celebration continues with Jon Faddis (October 19-22), and Lee Konitz (November 1-2) will also be honored for his 90th birthday. Dizzy’s Club Coca-Cola will kick off the holiday season with Wycliffe Gordon (November 22-26), who continues a soulful tradition of Thanksgiving residencies with his small group.

EDUCATION

Jazz at Lincoln Center’s Education Initiatives continue to reach larger and more diverse audiences in 2017-18. The innovative “Education on the Road” program, led by members of the Jazz at Lincoln Center Orchestra, continues to provide workshops, master classes, and other outreach activities as parts of the band’s national and international tours. Jazz Academy Media Library, the organization’s recently launched online education portal, houses over 1,000 freely available instructional videos covering a wide range of musical and historical topics.

Jazz at Lincoln Center Youth Programs enters a fifth year of tuition-free ensembles and classes for high school and middle school-age musicians. The program supports free jazz education for 16 ensembles in conjunction with the Middle School Jazz Academy’s continued presence at three sites in New York City: Frederick P. Rose Hall in Manhattan, Bishop Loughlin High School in Brooklyn, and Lehman College and Mind Builders in the Bronx. The Jazz for Young People® outreach program “Let Freedom Swing” extends to schools and community-based organizations throughout all five boroughs of New York City, as well as in Los Angeles, Detroit, Chicago, St. Louis, and other U.S. cities to present more than 500 concerts throughout the season. The Essentially Ellington program will continue to reach band directors and students in more than 4,500 schools and community groups worldwide by distributing more than 36,000 free scores of Duke Ellington and Chick Webb’s music, as well as other educational resources. Additionally, the program will expand its educational reach through a series of 20 regional festivals that enhance students’ understanding and appreciation of the music. The companion Band Director Academy program will continue its annual offerings at New York City’s Frederick P. Rose Hall, home of Jazz at Lincoln Center, with a focus on the essentials of teaching jazz, emphasizing hands-on learning and practical techniques.

Additional education programming:

Summer Jazz Academy with Wynton Marsalis at Bard College in Annandale-on-Hudson, NY will take place from July 17-30, 2017.

Nine licensed WeBop® sites in New York City and national partners in St. Louis, Chicago, Montclair, Seattle, Orlando, Eau Claire, and Omaha.

An increased number of free pre-concert lectures to supplement most JALC-produced events in Rose Theater and The Appel Room.

Listening Parties will provide attendees with new depths of insight into major jazz artists’ aesthetics and inspirations.

Visiting Band Workshops encourage band directors of student ensembles of all ages to bring their performing groups for a customized workshop at Frederick P. Rose Hall, home of Jazz at Lincoln Center, for an opportunity to work directly with JALC clinicians and artists.

TOURING

The Jazz at Lincoln Center Orchestra with Wynton Marsalis will be swinging on the road throughout Jazz at Lincoln Center’s 30th Anniversary Season. In June 2017, the Orchestra launches a month-long tour, which begins in Eastern Europe then heads to China in July for performances in six cities. In Shanghai, the band will reunite with the New York Philharmonic to reprise Wynton Marsalis’ Symphony No. 4: “The Jungle” on July 7.

In the fall, the Jazz at Lincoln Center Orchestra will tour the Northeast U.S., returning to the Chicago Symphony Center and then swinging through the South for the annual Big Band Holidays Tour.

Early 2018 brings the band back to Europe for special performances in some of the world’s greatest concert halls, including the Konzerthaus in Vienna and the Concertgebouw in Amsterdam. In addition, the JLCO will perform spring concerts at the Kimmel Center in Philadelphia and the Kennedy Center in Washington, D.C.

BLUEENGINE

Blue Engine Records, Jazz at Lincoln Center’s newest platform, continues to fulfill an important part of the organization’s mission: bringing Jazz at Lincoln Center’s music even further beyond its halls to a wider audience of music fans. Blue Engine Records is slated to release The Music of John Lewis by the Jazz at Lincoln Center Orchestra with Wynton Marsalis featuring Jonathan Batiste on March 24, 2017; Handful of Keys from the Jazz at Lincoln Center’s 2016–17 season opening concert featuring pianists Joey Alexander, Myra Melford, Larry Willis, Isaiah J. Thompson, Dick Hyman, and Helen Sung, and a compilation of love songs featuring iconic vocalists performing romantic ballads in late spring. The label has previously released four albums: Live in Cuba by the Jazz at Lincoln Center Orchestra with Wynton Marsalis; The Bronx Pyramid by Carlos Henriquez; Big Band Holidays by the Jazz at Lincoln Center Orchestra with Wynton Marsalis and special guests; and The Abyssinian Mass by the Jazz at Lincoln Center Orchestra with Wynton Marsalis featuring Damien Sneed and Chorale Le Chateau with special guest Reverend Dr. Calvin O. Butts, III. Blue Engine Records also produced two special vinyl projects: the Live in Cuba 4-LP vinyl box set and a Record Store Day Black Friday exclusive two-song, tree-shaped holiday record featuring previously unreleased Christmas songs from the Jazz at Lincoln Center Orchestra with Wynton Marsalis.

TICKETINFORMATION

Beginning today, current subscribers and donors to Jazz at Lincoln Center are invited to purchase subscriptions for all Rose Theater and The Appel Room concert packages, with savings of up to 15% off single ticket prices. To keep their same seats, current subscribers must renew beginning today through April 7, 2017. New subscriptions may be purchased beginning April 11, 2017.

Becoming a subscriber is the best way to lock in the best seats at the guaranteed best prices for the entire season, as single ticket prices will increase based on demand as concerts approach. Subscribers also have the benefit of utilizing free, unlimited ticket exchanges to manage their schedule. Completely customizable concert packages of three or more concerts (across both venues) are also available and come with a 10% discount off single ticket prices in addition to all other subscriber benefits.

For more information on 2017-18 season subscriptions, visit jazz.org/subs. To order a subscription or to request information, please call the Subscription Services hotline at 212-258-9999, e-mail subscriptions@jazz.org, or visit jazz.org/subs.

MEMBERSHIPDISCOUNT

Jazz at Lincoln Center offers a robust Membership program with a wide array of benefits, including deep discounts on concert tickets. Individuals who join at the $75 level and above are eligible to receive 50% off tickets to Jazz at Lincoln Center-produced concerts in Rose Theater and The Appel Room on the day of the event. Tickets must be purchased at the Jazz at Lincoln Center Box Office or online beginning at 12:01am the day of the performance. Members must show their valid membership card or log-in to jazz.org using their account credentials to receive this discount. Subject to availability. Learn more and sign up at jazz.org/membership.

VIP single ticket pre-sale for donors, members, and subscribers will be available starting June 20. Become a Jazz at Lincoln Center member by June 19 to access single tickets before the general public.

The Appel Room tickets are $60 and up, dependent on seating section for the 7pm sets, and $45 and up, dependent on seating section for the 9:30pm sets

Ticket prices for Jazz & Popular Song series performances in The Appel Room are $55 and up

Note: Hot Seats – $10 seats for each Rose Theater performance (excluding Jazz for Young People® concerts and other performances as specified) and select performances in The Appel Room (excluding Jazz & Popular Song concerts) – are available for purchase by the general public on the Wednesday prior to each performance. Tickets are subject to availability; please call 212-258-9800 for available Hot Seats performance dates.

Hot Seats are available only by walk up at the Box Office; maximum of two tickets per person. Jazz at Lincoln Center’s Hot Seats Ticket Discount Program is supported by the New York City Department of Cultural Affairs in partnership with the City Council.

*Please note that a $3.50 Jazz at Lincoln Center Facility Fee applies to ALL ticket purchases, with the exception of $10 Hot Seats. A $7 handling fee also applies when purchasing tickets from CenterCharge or when purchasing tickets online via jazz.org.

All single tickets for The Appel Room and Rose Theater can be purchased through jazz.org 24 hours a day or CenterCharge at 212-721-6500, open daily from 10am to 9pm. Tickets can also be purchased at the Jazz at Lincoln Center Box Office, located on Broadway at 60th Street, ground floor.

]]>Wed, 01 Mar 2017 07:35:00 +0000Jazz at Lincoln Center 2017 Gala Celebrates Ella at 100: Forever The First Lady of Songhttp://wyntonmarsalis.org/news/entry/jazz-at-lincoln-center-2017-gala-ella-first-lady-of-song
wynton_news_16282Jazz at Lincoln Center’s 2017 Gala, entitled “Ella at 100: Forever The First Lady of Song,” will celebrate the centennial of Ella Fitzgerald whose legacy and influence define a classic era of jazz vocal. Through a diverse and rich repertoire arranged by members of the Jazz at Lincoln Center Orchestra with Wynton Marsalis, the evening’s performances will demonstrate why Ella, the “First Lady of Song,” remains unrivaled in succinct phrasing and uncompromising musicality. The organization’s one-night only benefit performance and dinner – one of the most highly regarded social events in the city – will take place on Wednesday, April 26, 2017 at 7pm at Frederick P. Rose Hall, the “House of Swing,” located at Broadway at 60th Street, New York, New York.

Jazz at Lincoln Center will present the Ed Bradley Award for Leadership to David and Thelma Steward. In addition to providing generous support to Jazz at Lincoln Center’s education and performance initiatives, business leader and philanthropist David Steward and his wife Thelma have transformed the arts community in their adopted hometown, St. Louis. Jazz at Lincoln Center’s Ed Bradley Award for Leadership is named in honor of Ed Bradley who served on the Jazz at Lincoln Center board from 1992 until his death in 2007. The esteemed award recognizes and celebrates the integrity, wisdom, and pioneering spirit of outstanding leaders in jazz.

On this special evening the organization will bestow the Jazz at Lincoln Center Award for Artistic Excellence to NEA Jazz Master Benny Golson in recognition of the tenor saxophonist, composer and arranger’s influential career.

Proceeds from the 2017 Gala will help enable the diverse education programs and resources produced by Jazz at Lincoln Center each year. Through its concerts, free webcasts, direct musical instruction and distribution of scores, Jazz at Lincoln Center reaches more than two million people, of all ages, around the world.

A limited number of concert-only tickets are $150 and $200 and can be purchased on jazz.org 24 hours a day or by calling CenterCharge on 212-721-6500, open daily from 10am – 9pm. Tickets can also be purchased at the Jazz at Lincoln Center Box Office, located on Broadway at 60th Street, ground floor. Box office hours are Monday- Saturday from 10am to 6pm (or 30 minutes past curtain) and Sunday from noon to 6pm (or 30 minutes past curtain).

“It sounded so bad that first night,” Marsalis sighs, recalling the December 1999 premiere at Lincoln Center. “It was like I was in the middle of a bunch of noise. I felt like I had inflicted a crime on about two hundred people in public.”

Luckily, things got better.

“We were scheduled to play it the next October in Czechoslovakia,” the Pulitzer Prize-winning composer and legendary jazz trumpeter says. “I was trying to get out of that performance. But in the first rehearsal, it was like another piece of music. It sounded like music all of a sudden. Then we played. The people went crazy. They loved it. Ever since, it’s always gotten a tremendous response.”

Marsalis is bringing “All Rise” to Strathmore for two performances next weekend, a highlight of the venue’s season-long series, “Shades of Blues.” “I put a lot into the piece,” he says. “It took me about six months of writing around the clock. The last month my ears were so hot, they were actually hurting. I’ve never written music where I actually had my inner ear hurt because I was hearing so much music.”

The 12-movement piece, fusing blues, jazz, spiritual, and classical music and incorporating a choir of 150 gospel singers, was originally commissioned by the New York Philharmonic and its then-conductor Kurt Masur. “He wanted me to write a piece that celebrated bringing jazz and classical music and black and white people together in America,” says Marsalis. “But I started to think much broader than just people in America. What does it take to integrate with other people? That’s the subject of ‘All Rise.’ What does it take for us to come together, and what do we do when we come together?

“Those of us who don’t like the direction we’re going in, we have to protest illegal actions. Exercise our rights for citizens to create the country we want to create.”

“It’s very relevant to this moment,” he adds. “Times have been troubling for a long time. The 1960s were troubling. The 1970s were troubling. The movement away from integration that took place in the late ’70s was troubling. The reasserting of Confederate principles that took place in the 1980s by Ronald Reagan were troubling. The financial crisis that took place in the early ’90s was troubling. A lot of what’s happened in the last years have been troubling — mass incarcerations, privatization of jails, redistricting. We could go on and on and on.

“These days, it’s like we’re swinging back in the other direction. Yes, it’s troubling that we made the decisions we made, but we had the opportunity to vote, we showed up at the polls, and that’s what we decided. Those of us who don’t like the direction we’re going in, we have to protest illegal actions. Fight. Exercise our rights for citizens to create the country we want to create. It will not be easy. To think that centuries of tribalism and injustice just go away — they don’t.

“Kurt Masur told me when I was writing ‘All Rise’ — and I keep this quote on my phone — ‘The line between civilization and barbarism is much thinner than you think. That’s why with everything that you do, you have to decry barbarism and the reduction of people.‘”

“All Rise” will be performed on Friday, Feb. 24 at 8 p.m. and Sunday, Feb. 26, at 4 p.m. in the Music Center at Strathmore, 5301 Tuckerman Lane, North Bethesda, Md. Tickets are $65 to $175. Call 301-581-5100 or visit strathmore.org/blues

]]>Thu, 16 Feb 2017 16:31:00 +0000Rise uphttp://wyntonmarsalis.org/news/entry/rise-up
wynton_news_16257For more than 30 years, trumpeter, composer, bandleader, advocate for the arts, and educator Wynton Marsalis has helped propel jazz to the forefront of American culture.

In 1997, Marsalis was the first jazz artist to be awarded the Pulitzer Prize in music for his work, “Blood on the Fields,” and he’s been instrumental in keeping jazz on the mind of all generations. Today, he serves as the director of jazz studies at the Juilliard School and is managing and artistic director of jazz at Lincoln Center.

On Feb. 24 and Feb. 26, the Jazz at Lincoln Center Orchestra will perform Wynton Marsalis’ work, “All Rise” under the baton of William Eddins at the Strathmore. Marsalis and the orchestra will be joined on stage by the Morgan State University Gospel Choir, the Choral Arts Society of Washington and the National Philharmonic Orchestra.

“It’s a really big piece. It has over 100 voices [in the] choir, a full symphony orchestra and full jazz band,” Marsalis said. “It’s the integration of a lot of different forms of music and represents our humanity over time. It’s all about people coming together. It will be uplifting and I think people will feel much better when they leave about what we’re dealing with in our country at this time.”

Because it’s such a large undertaking, the piece isn’t performed too often, but Marsalis noted it has received tremendous acclaim in those instances where it has been played. The jazz great wrote “All Rise” in 1999 as a commissioned piece for the New York Philharmonic.

“Kurt Masur, who was maestro of the New York Philharmonic at the time, asked me to write a piece for the turn of the Millennium which would bring together the strain of Afro-music and Anglo-music that was represented in the tradition of Gershwin and Bernstein,” Marsalis said. “I started to think about it, and decided to write this music of all people coming together.”

He fleshed out his thoughts musically and the result was something spectacular.

“It’s a cycle of things we do. We’re born in joy, we play, we fall in love, we get full of ourselves, we suffer, we beg forgiveness and for mercy, it is granted, then we’re reborn, fall deeper in love and reach a higher level of consciousness,” Marsalis said. “It uses a 12-step form, describing what we do when we reach attainment.”

Having so much musical power on the stage at one time is something that Marsalis loves to see and hear.

“I remember the first time we did a rehearsal and I thought, ‘man, that’s a lot of adults’ and to see so many people playing together has an emotional impact on its own,” he said. “We have close to 180 people and it’s amazing.”

Marsalis first started studying the trumpet seriously at age 12, and gained experience as a young musician in local marching bands, jazz and funk bands, and classical youth orchestras.

“I didn’t like it at first because I didn’t want that ugly ring around my lips that all the New Orleans trumpet players had,” he said. “I told my dad, ‘girls aren’t going to like me.’ But I started listening to Coltrane and Miles and different jazz musicians and I started practicing and studying.”

His father was a jazz musician so he would often travel with him to gigs and watch the musicians play. By the time Marsalis was in high school, he was one of the best players in the area and would play funk and jazz gigs.

“My life was so indelibly shaped by watching my father play for almost no people for a very long time, I never go in front of any people anywhere and don’t think what a blessing it is,” Marsalis said. “Even if I’m in front of elementary school kids, I’m playing my horn the best I can play it.”

Musical education is important to Marsalis, and he heads a collection of 12 different educational programs at Jazz Lincoln Center.

“I’m teaching kids all the time and we’ll do over 200 concerts in New York City alone this year,” he said. “It’s important to introduce the music to as many young kids as we can.”

Marsalis has a big year ahead. In addition to performing “All Rise” at several venues, he is involved with the Lincoln Center’s big band, concert series, record company and education.

“I’m constantly engaged in music and trying to be a part of everything that goes on,” he said.

]]>Thu, 16 Feb 2017 08:18:00 +0000Jazz at Lincoln Center announces 15 Finalists for the 2017 Essentially Ellington Competitionhttp://wyntonmarsalis.org/news/entry/jazz-at-lincoln-center-announces-15-finalists-essentially-ellington-2017
wynton_news_16253Jazz at Lincoln Center proudly announces the 15 finalist bands that will compete in the 22nd Annual Essentially Ellington High School Jazz Band Competition & Festival – one of the most innovative jazz education events in the world – at Jazz at Lincoln Center’s home, Frederick P. Rose Hall, on May 11 – 13, 2017. The following finalists are among nearly 100 high school jazz bands across North America that entered the competition. Each school submitted recordings of three tunes performed from charts from Jazz at Lincoln Center’s Essentially Ellington library. Over 4,500 high school bands are members of Jazz at Lincoln Center’s 2016-17 Essentially Ellington program and benefited from free charts and resources.

The 2017 Essentially Ellington High School Jazz Band Finalists:

Byron Center High School (Byron Center, MI)Champaign Central High School (Champaign, IL)Denver School of the Arts (Denver, CO)Dillard Center for the Arts (Fort Lauderdale, FL)Edmonds-Woodway High School (Edmonds, WA)Foxborough High School (Foxborough, MA)Lexington High School (Lexington, MA)Mount Si High School (Snoqualmie, WA)Mountlake Terrace High School (Mountlake Terrace, WA)Newark Academy (Livingston, NJ)Osceola County School for the Arts (Orange City, FL)Plano West Senior High School (Plano, TX)Sun Prairie High School (Sun Prairie, WI)Triangle Youth Jazz Ensemble (Raleigh, NC)Tucson Jazz Institute (Tucson, AZ)

Jazz at Lincoln Center congratulates high school bands returning to the decades-long competition including Byron Center High School, Champaign Central High School, Denver School of the Arts, Dillard Center for the Arts, Edmonds-Woodway High School, Foxborough High School, Lexington High School, Mount Si High School, Mountlake Terrace High School, Newark Academy, Osceola County School for the Arts, Sun Prairie High School, Triangle Youth Jazz Ensemble and Tucson Jazz Institute as well as first-time contenders Plano West Senior High School.

All Essentially Ellington member bands were invited to submit a recording, and 15 finalists were selected through a rigorous screening process. Each finalist band receives an in-school workshop led by a professional musician before coming to New York to put up their “Dukes” and perform before Wynton Marsalis and a panel of esteemed judges.

On May 11, the finalist bands will arrive in New York City to spend three days immersed in workshops, jam sessions, rehearsals and performances at Jazz at Lincoln Center. On May 13, the Competition & Festival will conclude with a concert and awards ceremony featuring the three top-placing bands and the Jazz at Lincoln Center Orchestra with Wynton Marsalis.

Ethan Moffitt, the winner of the 2017 Essentially Ellington Student Composition/Arranging Contest, will have his composition recorded by the Jazz at Lincoln Center Orchestra with Wynton Marsalis. In addition, the winning composer will receive a $1,000 cash prize, a composition lesson with Ted Nash, GRAMMY award winning musician and longtime member of the Jazz at Lincoln Center, and a trip to New York City to observe the recording session and the Essentially Ellington Competition & Festival.

Festival events, including the final concert featuring the three top-placing bands and the Jazz at Lincoln Center Orchestra, will be webcast live on jazz.org/live.

The Competition & Festival is the culmination of the annual Essentially Ellington High School Jazz Band Program which also includes non-competitive regional festivals around the country, teaching resources, a summer Band Director Academy, and more. The year-long Essentially Ellington program will have distributed 36,000 newly transcribed scores by the end of this school year.

For more information including background, history, photos, and audio recordings of the Essentially Ellington 2017 repertoire, and more, visit: jazz.org/ee

The Essentially Ellington Competition & Festival is media-accessible via Jazz at Lincoln Center social media on Facebook, Twitter @EssEllington, Instagram @jazzdotorg, and Tumblr. Students, viewers, and participators can share their thoughts and photos by using the hashtag #EE2017

]]>Wed, 15 Feb 2017 17:07:00 +0000Blue Engine Records announces its newest release: The Music of John Lewishttp://wyntonmarsalis.org/news/entry/blue-engine-records-announces-its-newest-release-the-music-of-john-lewis
wynton_news_16248Honoring the legacy of the Modern Jazz Quartet’s maestro, John Lewis, Blue Engine Records announces its newest release: The Music of John Lewis by the Jazz at Lincoln Center Orchestra with Wynton Marsalis featuring Jon Batiste, available March 24.

The album marks the first recording featuring Wynton Marsalis and Jon Batiste, two longtime collaborators and New Orleans natives. The first single from The Music of John Lewis, “Piazza Navona,” is available for streaming on Spotify and as an iTunes download today.

In 2013, when the Jazz at Lincoln Center Orchestra with Wynton Marsalis set out to celebrate the esteemed pianist and composer, they teamed up with then rising star Jon Batiste. The bandleader of The Late Show with Stephen Colbert and a prodigious pianist in his own right, Batiste joined the Jazz at Lincoln Center Orchestra to tackle some of Lewis’s most iconic tunes during a sold-out concert in Rose Theater, the House of Swing.

Few musicians captured the sleek, swinging sophistication of jazz better than pianist, composer, and bandleader John Lewis, who had a long, deep, personal relationship with Jazz at Lincoln Center. “He used to always call our program a miracle,” says Wynton Marsalis. “He used to always say, ‘Keep that miracle going.’”

From the blistering bebop of “Two Bass Hit” to the down-home blues of “2 Degrees East, 3 Degrees West”—from small group configurations to the big band might of the Jazz at Lincoln Center Orchestra —The Music of John Lewis captures the elegance and soulfulness of Lewis’s daring compositions. The record also includes a four-movement suite pulled from the Modern Jazz Quartet’s classic recording The Comedy.

“The depth of his belief makes his music timeless,” Batiste says of Lewis. “For artists, what remains impactful and meaningful in one’s art depends on the accuracy and intensity of your insights. Mr. Lewis’s music is still with us, and it is an honor to place my artistry in the tradition of serving it. So put on this record, listen with your eyes closed, and engage your imagination.”

]]>Tue, 14 Feb 2017 16:26:00 +0000Jazz at Lincoln Center Orchestra Concerts Celebrate Jazz of the ‘50s and ‘60shttp://wyntonmarsalis.org/news/entry/jazz-at-lincoln-center-orchestra-concerts-celebrate-jazz-of-the-50s-and-60s
wynton_news_16234Jazz at Lincoln Center continues its season introspective, celebrating 100 years of recorded jazz, with two unique concerts featuring the Jazz at Lincoln Center Orchestra with Wynton Marsalis: Jazz of the ’50s: Overflowing with Style on February 17 -18, and Free to Be: Jazz of the ’60s & Beyond on March 17-18 at Rose Theater. In addition to performing new and classic arrangements, the Jazz at Lincoln Center Orchestra will be led by two of their own – trombonist Chris Crenshaw, music director and arranger for Jazz of the ’50s: Overflowing with Style, and saxophonist Walter Blanding, music director for Free to Be: Jazz of the ’60s & Beyond. Jazz of the ’50s: Oveflowing with Style and Jazz of the ’60s & Beyond will respectively include world premieres by Crenshaw and Blanding.

Jazz of the ’50s: Overflowing with Style and Free to Be: Jazz of the ’60s & Beyond will take place at Jazz at Lincoln Center’s Rose Theater at Frederick P. Rose Hall, located at Broadway at 60th Street, New York, New York.

Crenshaw, known as a young genius with perfect pitch and perfect time, is also a composer, arranger, singer, and conductor in his own right. Crenshaw will premiere The Fifties – A Prism, a new composition that will showcase the Orchestra’s wide range of talent and stylistic versatility. Jazz at Lincoln Center is celebrating the ‘50s as a decade of growth and creativity within the jazz world, bringing jazz beyond the clubs and into regular programming of esteemed concert halls, exemplified by legendary artists such as Gerry Mulligan, Miles Davis, Art Blakey, and Ornette Coleman.

“As the times and society changed, the music followed suit, but the jazz tradition remained true. This decade symbolizes the crux of the New Orleans period through the Swing Era, and the launch of fresh and innovative ways of expressing and enhancing jazz,” says Crenshaw. “I titled my new work The Fifties – A Prism to reflect the different colors and forms of music that came out during the ’50s, in the same way a prism reflects white light into a spectrum of colors. My hope is the audience will enjoy the music and take care of it; that they will appreciate just how great the ’50s were, and the incredible depth and breadth of jazz music throughout the decade.”

In March, the Orchestra will perform masterpieces of the ’60s and beyond, works by Ornette Coleman, John Coltrane, Dave Brubeck, and Charles Mingus. Blanding will also debut a big band arrangement of Sonny Rollin’s historic “Freedom Suite,” as well as premiere his original piece The Happiness of Being, a musical reflection on the meaning of freedom. For this piece, Blanding asks “What comes to mind when we think about freedom? Do we think about the civil rights movement? Or slavery? Or does it bring to mind other things, such as freedom to think, speak, and act without fear? The Happiness of Being explores all of these thoughts. Perhaps freedom is also simply the joy of being oneself.” This program reflects jazz’s ever-present role in the pursuit of America’s most sacred right: freedom.

Chris Crenshaw was born in Thomson, Georgia on December 20, 1982. Since birth, he has been driven by and surrounded by music. When he started playing piano at age three, his teachers and fellow students noticed his aptitude for the instrument. This love for piano led to his first gig with Echoes of Joy, his father Casper’s group. He picked up the trombone at 11 and hasn’t put it down since. He graduated from Thomson High School in 2001 and received his bachelor’s degree with honors in jazz performance from Valdosta State University in 2005. He was awarded Most Outstanding Student in the VSU Music Department and College of Arts. In 2007, Crenshaw received his Master’s degree in Jazz Studies from The Juilliard School where his teachers included Dr. Douglas Farwell and Wycliffe Gordon. He has worked with Gerard Wilson, Jiggs Whigham, Carl Allen, Marc Cary, Wessell Anderson, Cassandra Wilson, Eric Reed, and many more. In 2006 Crenshaw joined the Jazz at Lincoln Center Orchestra and in 2012 he composed God’s Trombones, a spiritually focused work which was premiered by the orchestra at Jazz at Lincoln Center. The new composition will be Crenshaw’s third work for Jazz at Lincoln Center.

Walter Blanding was born into a musical family on August 14, 1971 in Cleveland, Ohio. He began playing the saxophone at age six and by age 16, he was performing regularly with his parents at the Village Gate. Blanding attended LaGuardia High School of Music and Art and Performing Arts and continued his studies at the New School for Social Research where he earned a B.F.A. in 2005. His 1991 debut release, Tough Young Tenors, was acclaimed as one of the best jazz albums of the year, and his artistry began to impress listeners and critics alike. He has been a member of the Jazz at Lincoln Center Orchestra since 1998 and has performed, toured and/or recorded with his own groups and with such renowned artists as the Cab Calloway Orchestra, Roy Hargrove, Hilton Ruiz, Count Basie Orchestra, Illinois Jacquet Big Band, Wycliffe Gordon, Marcus Roberts, Wynton Marsalis Quintet, Isaac Hayes, and many others. Blanding lived in Israel for four years and had a major impact on the music scene there while touring the country with his own ensemble and with U.S. artists such as Louis Hayes, Eric Reed, and Vanessa Rubin. He taught music in several Israeli schools and eventually opened his own private school in Tel Aviv. During this period, Newsweek International called him a “Jazz Ambassador to Israel.”

The Jazz at Lincoln Center Orchestra, comprising 15 of the finest jazz soloists and ensemble players today, has been the Jazz at Lincoln Center resident orchestra since 1988. Featured in all aspects of Jazz at Lincoln Center’s programming, this remarkably versatile orchestra performs and leads educational events in New York, across the U.S. and around the globe; in concert halls; dance venues; jazz clubs; public parks; and with symphony orchestras; ballet troupes; local students; and an ever-expanding roster of guest artists.

Free pre-concert lectures nightly at 7pm.

Tickets prices start at $35 and can be purchased on jazz.org 24 hours a day or by calling CenterCharge on 212-721-6500, open daily from 10am – 9pm. Tickets can also be purchased at the Jazz at Lincoln Center Box Office, located on Broadway at 60th Street, ground floor. Box office hours are Monday- Saturday from 10am to 6pm (or 30 minutes past curtain) and Sunday from noon to 6pm (or 30 minutes past curtain).

Hot Seats, $10 tickets for select Rose Theater and The Appel Room performances, are released for sale on the Wednesday prior to the performance. All Hot Seats are available for purchase in person only at the Jazz at Lincoln Center Box Office. Maximum of two tickets per person; subject to availability. For the dates of qualifying Hot Seat performances, please call 212-258-9800.

]]>Thu, 26 Jan 2017 15:42:00 +0000Can Wynton Marsalis and Lincoln Center Save Jazz Music?http://wyntonmarsalis.org/news/entry/can-wynton-marsalis-and-lincoln-center-save-jazz-music
wynton_news_16212Research says that people imprint on music in their dating years, and carry those tastes with them through the rest of their lives. Lately, this has spelled trouble for jazz music, which is failing to attract new and younger fans in a competitive musical landscape. With its listenership in steep decline, jazz legend Wynton Marsalis is looking to rebrand the genre and engineer its comeback, with the help of Professor Rohit Deshpande.

TRANSCRIPT:

Brian Kenny: According to Nielsen’s 2014 year-end report, the popularity of jazz has hit an all-time low. At the time of the report both jazz and classical represented just 1.4 percent of total music consumption in the US. In real numbers, that’s 5.2 million albums sold by all jazz artists combined in 2014. Compare that to the best-selling artist of 2014, Taylor Swift. She sold 3.7 million copies of her latest album, “1989,” in the last two months of 2014 alone.

How is it that this uniquely American form of music, the soundtrack for the first half of the 20th century, has fallen so far? More importantly, can it be revived? Today we’ll hear from Professor Rohit Deshpandé about his case study entitled “Wynton Marsalis and Jazz at the Lincoln Center.”

Professor Deshpandé is an expert in global branding and international marketing. He teaches both executives and MBA students here at Harvard Business School, and I’m going to guess you’re a jazz fan. Rohit, thanks for joining me.

Rohit Deshpandé: It’s a pleasure, thank you.

Kenny: Are you one of the apparently few people that listens to jazz?

Deshpandé: Unfortunately, yes. Or, fortunately, yes.

Kenny: I loved this case. Full disclosure, I am a musician. I am not a jazz musician. I play popular music, but I love jazz. Can you begin by setting up the case for us? We’ve got a great protagonist in this one.

Deshpandé: Wynton Marsalis is just an amazing musician, an amazing artist. He has a long list of accolades. One of the early ones was he was, I believe, the first artist who was nominated for and won two Grammys in a single year—one for the best jazz recording and one for the best classical recording. He was 21 years old. He repeated that the following year with two Grammys that he won, again for a jazz recording and the best classical recording. He has gone on to win a Pulitzer for an opera, an oratorio that he wrote called Blood on the Fields.

Kenny: That’s pretty impressive. Did you get to hang out with Wynton in the course of doing this?

Deshpandé: The background is that Wynton gave a series of six lectures at Harvard University, lecture/performances. After one of them he was on a panel with a few faculty from the Business School at the i-lab, and the panel was about the artist as an entrepreneur. I was very fortunate to be part of that panel. We spoke after the discussion about the topic of branding. He wanted to talk about how Jazz at Lincoln Center might think about its brand. That’s where the conversation started. We kept in touch and eventually I pitched the idea of a case study.

Kenny: Why did you decide to do that in video-based format?

Deshpandé: This case study was developed to teach in our first year MBA course in marketing, working off the assumption (which turned out to be valid) that the vast majority of our MBA students are not familiar with jazz, maybe haven’t even heard jazz before. They had to hear it and not just read about it. Because jazz is, as you know, a form of improvisational music, it wasn’t enough to just hear it. They had to see it. This kind of made it natural, if you will, for a multimedia case.

Kenny: One of the things that Wynton does in the very beginning part of the case is he defines jazz, and it made perfect sense to me the way that he defined it. He talks about it having three parts; improv, swing, and blues. Can you talk a little bit about the history of jazz as it’s described in the case?

Deshpandé: Jazz has a very long history. Wynton dates it back to New Orleans, which also happens to be where he grew up, where he was born. It’s a combination of different forms of music: western ballroom dancing music, French primarily given that this is a part of Louisiana, then influenced by Gospel music, black church music. These influences came together to form a different kind of music that started from the south and then came north. Big bands traveled, established themselves in Chicago, which became a major place for jazz musicians, and also of course in New York, smaller jazz clubs in Harlem.

Kenny: This was really an African American form of expression and art, very popular in that community, but at some point started to cross that divide and became embraced by all members of society.

Deshpandé: It’s interesting, a lot of people today don’t realize that jazz was initially music that you danced to. You took a date and you went to a club where a band, perhaps a large swing band, played jazz, and you danced to it. When the interest in music changed in the ’60s and people were no longer interested in that kind of dance music, the nature of the dances changed, jazz lost popularity. In business terms there was more competition and the audience changed.

Kenny: Rock and roll I guess was a disruptive force in that equation.

Deshpandé: That’s exactly right.

Kenny: We’ll talk a little bit more about the challenges that the jazz industry faces. I’m curious about how jazz ended up at Lincoln Center, a place where you think of classical music, opera and ballet.

Deshpandé: I think a lot of this had to do with Wynton Marsalis and his initiative. Marsalis is a classically trained musician. He was trained at Julliard, and so he has connections in both the jazz community, of course, but also in the classical music community. One of the things that Jazz at Lincoln Center as an institution has been doing is acting as an advocate for the music and pushing jazz music education, especially in public schools. In marketing terms, people were already familiar with the Lincoln Center brand, so in a sense Jazz at Lincoln Center was leveraging off the Lincoln Center brand. I think that led to the success in raising the necessary funds to be able to build this amazing institution. It turns out that the major audience for jazz in America tend to be people in their 50s and 60s. They tend to be white, and relatively affluent. That could be a description of the audience at a classical event or opera event in Lincoln Center. Keep in mind that tickets are quite expensive to events at Lincoln Center.

Kenny: That gets to one of the fundamental challenges that Jazz at Lincoln Center has, which is how do they appeal to a new audience? How do they start to grow that audience? You talk about that in the case.

Deshpandé: Right. Not only has the popularity of jazz declined, but interest in attending live concerts has declined. Actually, a very significant decline in the last ten years in two critical age groups: 18 to 24 and 25 to 35. Jazz has an aging audience and a big issue for an institution like Jazz at Lincoln Center is, how do you get young people interested?

Kenny: The other challenge obviously is that the way people consume music has changed quite a bit with the advent of digital music. A jazz purist still listens to vinyl. How do they think about that challenge?

Deshpandé: It’s a very difficult issue. The music industry is in disarray, as we know. You can’t make money selling records anymore. The money is in doing a live concert and merchandise around the live concert. You basically give away the album as advertising in order to build an audience for the live concert. Even at the live concert, unless you’re really at the top, the promoters are the ones that are making the money. In clubs, it’s the DJs who are making the money.

Kenny: The other thing that comes through in the case is the fact that even within the jazz community there’s some divisiveness. There’s a disagreement on what is real jazz.

Deshpandé: In the case we refer to this as the identity problem in jazz. There are a lot of people arguing over what really makes for jazz music. Wynton Marsalis has a purist notion. He believes in the jazz canon. He believes that it should be acoustic, it should be rooted in the musical traditions of Louis Armstrong, Duke Ellington, Fats Waller, and so on. Even if you look at an absolutely magnificent jazz musician like Miles Davis, he changed the nature of his music at one point and went electronic, did a lot of fusion kind of work. Whether or not that falls in the canon is a point of dispute. Now there is some experimentation among younger musicians between jazz and hip hop. Robert Glasper is doing some interesting things here. Again, there’s this controversy within the jazz world, within jazz conservatories, over what should be considered jazz.

Kenny: There’s a lot of challenges that they face at Jazz at the Lincoln Center. How are they thinking about taking those on?

Deshpandé: When we have this case discussion one of the issues we talk about, since it’s a case written for a marketing class, is who’s the audience and what is of value that jazz creates for that audience? Who competes for that audience and what is the value that they are offering? If it’s the older audience that jazz already has, how can they retain that customer? If it’s a younger audience, how do they make jazz attractive to a younger audience? One of the points that comes out in our class discussion is the notion of celebrity. Young people are very attracted to celebrities in music and in other forms of art. Do they need to have someone with celebrity? Do they need to have a younger face for jazz? There is this remarkable 13-year-old prodigy, Joey Alexander from Bali, Indonesia, who is just rocking the jazz world right now. He was featured on 60 Minutes, he is being mentored by Wynton Marsalis, just amazing, amazing musician. He plays by ear, he doesn’t use notes when he’s playing. His first album last year was nominated for two Grammys, one for the best improvisational album and one for the best jazz album. He’s 13. Could he be the face of jazz? That’s one point of discussion.

The other is, is the audience the consumer or is the audience the philanthropist? That’s a whole another conversation. A conversation that is not as common when we discuss businesses in private-sector settings, but is much more common when we talk about nonprofit settings where the institution is sustained by philanthropy rather than by ticket sales or rather than by subscriptions. Again, in business terms, what’s the appropriate business model and how is that linked to the segmentation of the audience?

Kenny: You’ve discussed this in class. Have you done with both MBA and executive education students?

Deshpandé: Yes I have, as well as in reunions.

Kenny: I’m curious to know how they both come at it, because there are different age groups there.

Deshpandé: The big difference is the familiarity with the music. MBA students are not as familiar with the music. The Executive Education classes are much more familiar with the music, and in our reunion classes, where our alums select which classes they’re going to go to, they come because they love the music. The nature of the discussion changes. For instance, in the MBA class there were some students that said, “Just like classical music, it’s had its heyday and its time is gone. There’s nothing that can be done about it because it’s passé.” That never happens in these Executive Education classes, and certainly does not happen in the reunion classes.

Kenny: Do you think it’s maybe because this is an acquired taste, it’s like your food palate grows over time, so young people just don’t really appreciate it until they’re a little bit older?

Deshpandé: The dilemma here is how do you get young people at any age to start being interested in jazz? There is some research that says that people imprint on music in their romantic years, the time that they’re dating. That would be high school through college, more or less. Jazz is losing generations of young people because they’re not exposed to it during that time. Jazz is no longer the music of rebellion, hip hop is. This is not something that’s easily solved.

Kenny: Have you had Wynton come to any classes?

Deshpandé: I have not had Wynton come to classes. We had the head of marketing for Jazz at Lincoln Center.

Kenny: She’s also featured extensively in the case. What were her takeaways from that?

Deshpandé: She was very impressed by the range of opinions, this is in the MBA class, and how strongly people argued for different positions. There was a very interesting exchange in one of the classes where I believe it was a European student who said, “This is much like we’ve seen with classical music, it’s time has gone.” There was an African American student who said, “You don’t understand, the existence of jazz validates my culture.” There are very interesting constructive differences of opinion on the importance of the music, the validity of the music, the cultural significance of the music, and what might be done to sustain it.

Kenny: You can find the “Wynton Marsalis and Jazz at the Lincoln Center” case along with thousands of others in the HBS Case Collection at hbr.org. I’m Brian Kenny, and you’ve been listening to Cold Call, the official podcast of Harvard Business School.

Tickets for Juilliard Jazz Ensemble concerts are $20 and available” events.juilliard.edu”:http://events.juilliard.edu. Tickets are free for Juilliard students; non-Juilliard students may purchase tickets for $10.

The next time Wynton Marsalis writes a symphony for the New York Philharmonic, he might want to plan from the start to keep it well under an hour. At least if he wants to assure that the Philharmonic will be able to perform it complete.

Timing was a factor in 2010, when Alan Gilbert led the American premiere of Mr. Marsalis’s Symphony No. 3, “Swing Symphony,” on a season-opening gala program. Because it was being televised on “Live From Lincoln Center,” the concert had to come in under two hours. So Mr. Gilbert dropped the first of Mr. Marsalis’s six movements, which still left some 45 minutes of music. (The symphony was performed in full the following season, and then again, with yet another movement added, in 2013.)

On Wednesday at David Geffen Hall, Mr. Gilbert conducted the premiere of Mr. Marsalis’s Symphony No. 4, “The Jungle.” Because the score was so long and demanding and the rehearsal schedule so tight, the orchestra said, Mr. Gilbert and Mr. Marsalis agreed to skip the first of this symphony’s six movements. The remaining five still made for a substantial piece of 50 minutes.

The challenges of Mr. Marsalis’s orchestral works come not just from their length and demands, but from the defining character of the music, which strives to blend jazz, blues and swing into the classical symphonic realm. It’s difficult to fuse such contrasting styles, both for Mr. Marsalis as composer and the Philharmonic musicians. In “The Jungle,” Mr. Marsalis for the most part finds the sweet spot, despite stretches that come close to pastiche. As with his Third Symphony, it combines the Philharmonic and a complement of impressive musicians from the Jazz at Lincoln Center Orchestra, including Mr. Marsalis, playing trumpet with his usual brilliance.

“The Jungle” is a musical portrait of New York City, the “most fluid, pressure-packed, and cosmopolitan metropolis the modern world has ever seen,” as Mr. Marsalis writes in a program note. The opening “Big Show” movement evokes, he says, the “brash, brassy, razzle-dazzle of our city.” It starts with a call-to-attention fanfare, sputtering and slightly askew. There are hints of ragtime and bursts of popular dance. The vernacular elements sounded freshest when Mr. Marsalis folded them into passages of symphonic mass, with thick, pungent chords and boldly fractured phrases.

I found “Lost in Sight (Post-Pastoral)” the most compelling movement because here Mr. Marsalis seemed to take the biggest risks. At first, reflective passages full of poignant melodic turns and blues-tinged, plushly orchestrated harmonies alternate with vibrantly jazzy, fidgety episodes. At one point, a fugue on a hymnlike subject begins, first in the strings, section by section, then among the jazz musicians and, eventually, the full orchestra. Somehow, working within the confines of this traditional form, the originality of Mr. Marsalis’s teeming musical imagination and the precision of his technique came through strongest.

Though colorfully scored, “La Esquina,” Mr. Marsalis’ homage to New York’s Afro-Latin culture, was the most generic and least original movement, perhaps too beholden to its Hispanic musical sources. “Us,” which evokes being “with, against, and up against another” in the city, recalled for me 1940s film noir scores. “Struggle in the Digital Market,” the final movement, was also effective for the bold way Mr. Marsalis juxtaposed raw, wailing brass with spinning melodic twists, often hovering over obsessively repeated syncopated riffs. Rather than driving toward a frantic conclusion, the music slowly splinters, as if the component parts are slipping away, a surprising coda that leaves you thinking.

Mr. Gilbert chose two nicely complementary works for the first half of the program, which opened with another kind of urban portrait: Copland’s contemplative “Quiet City,” scored for English horn (Grace Shryock), trumpet (Christopher Martin) and strings. Then he led a feisty, colorful account of William Bolcom’s fantastical, blues-tinged Trombone Concerto, written for the Philharmonic’s superb principal trombonist, Joseph Alessi, who played dazzlingly. The orchestra gave the premiere of this piece in June as part of its NY Phil Biennial. It was good to hear it again.

For Marsalis completists, the Philharmonic will perform all six movements of the “The Jungle” on tour this July in Shanghai.

Acclaimed musician Wynton Marsalis hits all the right notes as the leader of the impeccably dressed jazz at Lincoln center orchestra. Here, he sits down with writer Darrell Hartman to talk about jazz as a uniquely American art form and share his own style improvisations.

The 54-year-old jazz legend seeks harmony in his style, too, and dresses to the nines whenever he performs. His reasoning is simple: “It’s to show respect for the art.”

Colors in conversation, a crisp suit and tie—what Marsalis calls his “clean” look is just one of his many expressions of that respect. He’s received countless awards, both for his trumpet wizardry and original compositions, and more recently for broader contributions as well. As managing and artistic director of Jazz at Lincoln Center, a not-for-profit organization Marsalis initiated three decades ago, the decorated bandleader and educator (and friend of Brooks Brothers) is more or less the face of an art form—jazz, arguably the most American music genre of all. We spoke to Marsalis about personal style, the essential interplay of rules and improvising, and more.

Brooks Brothers: How did you arrive at your sense of style? Wynton Marsalis: The greatest style lesson I’ve had is from noticing how we dressed in the seventies and early eighties. We thought we looked really nice. But later, those photos looked like I was trying out for the Sunday paper’s cartoon section! The suits looked like they needed electric cords. I changed my concept in the mid-eighties. Now I like a more classic style, one that will transcend the vicissitudes of time. That’s what Brooks Brothers is about: clean lines, elegance, not-too-crazy color combinations.

BB: For you, what’s the creative side of getting dressed?Wynton: I make little changes, like for the lapels or cuffs to be a certain way. I get creative with mixing and matching patterns. Wearing a white handkerchief in my pocket—I’ve been doing that for a while. I like my lines to be clean and my color combinations to be like jazz: the freedom to express myself, but not for that expression of myself to be the statement. Not like, ‘Look, Ma, no hands!’

BB: I know you’ve talked before about maintaining the standards set by that older generation of dapper jazz musicians. Which performers in particular stand out?Wynton: I mean, take your pick. There’s Miles Davis, whose dress was always modest. Frank Sinatra was in the ‘all-clean club.’ And Duke Ellington, he was always right. He had the artist’s eye. Powder-blue shirt, deep purple tie—he knew how to put his colors together.

BB: Let’s talk about the music. What sets jazz apart as an art form? Wynton: First, there’s a grid that underlies it. Like Manhattan. Like faucets, fire hydrants and the pipes underneath the streets. Like anything that has been standardized, it provides a form. Then what do you do? Improvise, and improvisation on that form tells us whether you can play or not. It’s like a basketball player making 35-foot shots: not easy.

BB: And what’s the jazz equivalent of those 35-footers?Wynton: First, play on the harmonic progression. Second, play with feeling—the feeling and wisdom of the blues. Third is to play with other people. It seems simple, but it’s not.

BB: Which of those skills took you the longest to get good at?Wynton: Playing with “the blues” was probably the most difficult for me. I grew up in New Orleans, in funk, which is not the same expression.

BB: And which came most naturally? Wynton: Playing with other people. My brother could play, and I was used to playing with him.

BB: You seem to respect rules, or at least admit their importance, more than some other musicians do. Wynton: Rules are what make you free. The more you understand that grid, the freer you are. And the more skills you have, too—a basketball player who can really dribble is going to be freer on the court than one who can’t. Of course, every now and then, you change the rules.

**BB:* Your role at JALC has made you a global ambassador of sorts for American jazz. What’s that role like?
Wynton:* We travel a lot; it’s part of our mission. You’ve got to be in front of people, to feel them and let them feel you and your intentions. It’s a tradition of our music to go and spread the best of American culture. Jazz is international music. Duke Ellington went to the Middle East in 1963; Benny Goodman went to Russia. We don’t go with any arrogance, but just to be a part of what’s going on. You receive a lot also. We’re always embraced when we travel.

BB: Why do you think that is?Wynton: Musicians respect jazz musicians because they know how difficult our music is. They want to know how we play together. And we’ve done a lot of collaborations with musicians from other cultures—learned their music and participated in what they do.

BB: What are some of the common threads you’ve found?Wynton: Habanera rhythm is in music all over the world, for some reason. And the pentatonic sound of the blues. You hear those five notes in Eastern music, African music, South American music…

BB: How important is it for a musician to develop his or her own playing style?Wynton: That is the single most important thing in jazz: have our own sound. Some people always have it, and some have to achieve it.

BB: What was that process like for you? Wynton: I had influences, but I feel like I always had my own style. I wasn’t playing that good at 18 or 19— but you can tell it was me.

BB:JALC is celebrating a century of recorded music this fall. You clearly love playing live. But why are recordings worth celebrating? Wynton: It’s like the value of a score or a library. If you didn’t have recordings of Louis Armstrong, you wouldn’t know how he played. Look at Shakespeare, the Greeks. The human condition is not changing, so anything that is soul nourishing needs to be preserved. We also create new things all the time—but these two things don’t fight each other. Our souls are ancient and young at the same time.

BB: But you’re a father and an educator. I imagine you’re very familiar with how aggressively the new and trendy stuff can be, crowding its way in. Does that pressure make it a challenge to get students interested in music that’s been around awhile? Wynton: It’s always hard to engage young people in anything serious, whether you’re an English teacher or a basketball coach. That’s part of what being an adult is. I don’t think anything is an obstacle for young people, except education. Did I know anything about Beethoven? No—I just heard it and knew it was great.

BB: So you’re not worried that a ‘classic’ will seem irrelevant or uncool to a young person?Wynton: If you’re 15 years old, you don’t know what a classic is. Maybe you’re interested; maybe you’re not. I try not to teach generational prejudices. That’s part of how kids are marketed to, and I come to teach, not to market. I just try to get people to hear things and discover them for themselves.

BB: You’re also an arranger of music. What exactly does that mean? I understand you recently devised a colorful way of illustrating this onstage for a group of students.Wynton: That was the ‘clothing show.’ We put on wild stuff in haphazard fashion, mismatched ties and so on, to show how an arranger figures out how to get everyone coordinated. An arranger takes those elements of rhythm, harmony, melody and texture, and puts them in a certain type of balance.

BB: Normally, though, it sounds like finding that harmony is a big part of getting dressed for a show. Why make the effort?Wynton: For me, it’s to show respect for the art. You came to see me play; I want to be clean. Yes, I could play with a T-shirt on and play the same way, but I’m going to put a suit on—the way you do when you go to church or to a meeting. I grew up around people who didn’t have anything, and if they put on a suit, no matter where it came from, that meant something. I never lost that, even if I would go to school in gym pants when I was younger. But now I’m different. My shoes are shined. I ‘put my knot on.’ I’m ironed. I’m ready.

Jonathan Kelly works as a music supervisor for Wynton Marsalis. In previous blog posts he explained how he got his enviable gig and shared some details of a collaboration between Wynton and the Garth Fagan Dance Company. Recently Jonathan and Wynton have been hard at work on a violin concerto, “Concerto in D,” in collaboration with Scottish violinist Nicola Benedetti. This project has been captured in a documentary film titled “Nicky and Wynton: The Making of a Concerto” by producer/director Chris Eley.

Upon seeing the trailer I was totally intrigued and reached out to Jonathan to catch up.

Can you describe your work with Wynton today? Has your role continued to evolve over the years?

Well my main role with Wynton is as a copyist. We’ve worked together now since 1999, so it’s also part mind reader. Ha.

I suppose in terms of evolution, I work much more closely with collaborators today than I would have when I started. For instance, with “Concerto in D,” I worked a lot with Nicola Benedetti for whom the concerto is written. The piece has been played with 5 or 6 orchestras at this point and when Wynton has had schedule conflicts, I’ve traveled with Nicky and done my best to fill Wynton’s role at rehearsals.

When did you first learn about the concerto?

To be honest with you, I can’t remember. Wynton’s so prolific that as a way to remain sane, I tend to only think about the project at hand. It may have been mentioned to me a few years ago, but I wasn’t really aware of it until Nicky started reaching out to me and seeing if we were working on it yet!

Was Ms. Benedetti involved from the start?

She’s been absolutely integral to the whole piece. From advocating for it with orchestras, to helping with the form, to being the absolute best critic of the piece, she’s been irreplaceable.

Can you describe your collaborative workflow on this particular project?

Since Nicky was so involved, we worked on this in a pretty unorthodox manner. We wrote the entirety of her part first, improved it with her input, and then orchestrated after her part was pretty much set.

As we’ve talked about before, Wynton still works in pencil and he’s almost always on the move, whether it be with the Jazz at Lincoln Center Orchestra or education initiatives, etc. Wherever he is, he’ll write some music and then send me texts with the pictures.

It beats the old days when he used to call me at three o’clock in the morning to have me come down to his apartment and pick up his manuscripts!

So much of this collaboration done long-distance?

It’s almost entirely done long-distance. For this piece, a filmmaker for the BBC named Chris Eley was filming a documentary and communication and travel really became a vital story line for the piece. Nicky’s in London, I’m in France and Wynton’s in New York. Or, I’m in New York, Wynton’s in Abu Dhabi and Nicky’s in Germany. It was pretty challenging time-zone-wise. But time zones don’t mean quite so much when you don’t sleep!

After Wynton’s hand-written sketches, how much of this work is done in Finale?

It’s all done in Finale once he gives me his pencil score. I’ll put everything into a full score format and from that point forward he’ll make any necessary pencil edits direct to a Finale produced score.
Inevitably during a piece like this, we fall behind schedule and an exasperated Wynton will call me and say, “Damn, I can’t possibly work any faster. How can we do this faster?” And I reply, “You gotta learn Finale, Papa.” He might be too old for new tricks, but I haven’t given up hope.

Do you ever revert back to an earlier versions for creative reasons?

For sure. For instance, with Nicky’s cadenza in the middle of the piece, I literally have over 50 versions saved. She would play through it and then want to go back to some earlier content. She’s not to blame for this; it’s really just Wynton’s process. If you go to Wynton and say, “Hey, I think bars 35-36 need some work,” he will re-write bars 25-57. It’s just the way he is. He’s an absolute machine of melodic material.

How does the project differ from other projects you’ve done together?

Nicky’s involvement is really what made this project so unique. I’ve done a bunch of collaborations, and they can be really challenging. Everybody’s workflow is so different and things can fall apart pretty quickly, especially with such big personalities.

When I met Nicky we clicked like old friends. I knew it would be better, but it’s still fraught with difficulties. So, I said to her, “Hey, let’s try and be friends when this is all over.” I don’t think she really knew what I meant, but she understood by the time the piece premiered in London!

It’s so many hours of work, it’s joy, it’s disappointment, it’s stress and it doesn’t exist in a vacuum; none of us have the type of careers that we can just go into the mountains for three months and come out with a piece. I mean, can you imagine the faith and courage it takes for a rising star violinist to enlist some of the greatest orchestras in the world and convince them to commission a piece that they will have to play whether they like it or not?! I can’t even imagine it.

Are you typically at the performances of the concerto?

I’m rarely at concerts because by the time one piece premieres, I’m usually knee deep in the next piece, but this one was bit different. Wynton actually couldn’t be at the world premiere of the piece in London because of a scheduling conflict, so I went in his stead.

The show went great and there’s a lot of high fives and hugs going on backstage. I wrote to Wynton and said, “It was great.” By the time things calmed down and I looked back at my phone I had dozens of texts from Wynton and a handful of missed calls. If I remember correctly, the last text from him read something like, “Well, Mr. Kelly, thanks for your thoughtful analysis of my piece!”

The trailer for the film is wonderful. I love Wynton’s quote at the end: “I love jazz music. And I love the orchestra. Now I think the two can come together; I may not be able to do it, but somebody can do it.” Can you talk about your aspect of this challenge?

I’ve now worked on 5 or 6 long form pieces for symphony orchestra that incorporate American styles of music including jazz and blues. I still haven’t conquered the challenge that he is alluding to in the clip.

Early in my career, I felt it was best to leave a lot of freedom in the interpretation to the musician. Then, I pulled a complete 180 and felt the need to articulate EVERYTHING and be very specific with instructions. Now, I’m starting to wonder; we never have enough rehearsal time and maybe that extra ink is actually more prohibitive than helpful. I’m not really clear on the best way to notate idiomatic things yet. If anyone has any good ideas, I’m all ears.

It’s certainly different in a workshop or school setting where you actually have time to talk to the musicians; but with the concerto, we are lucky to get 90 minutes of rehearsal time for a 45-minute piece that the musicians have never heard. It’s really challenging. Every minute you waste in rehearsal because of a lack of clarity in the notation, is a minute could be spent digging deeper and really finding the intention of the music.

Chris did a great job of capturing the difficulties that emerge with writing new music. And I’m not just saying this because I play the role of the court jester throughout the film!

Have any Finale tips? Things you like about Finale? Things you’d change?

In terms of tips, the best thing to do is follow this blog. No matter how long you have used the program, there is always some better, more efficient way to do things. In your interview with Hamilton orchestrator Alex Lacamoire, for instance, he talked about copying expressions to a nearby stave by clicking the handle, and pressing up or down while holding the Option key. Game Changer! It would be great if you could do that with hairpin crescendos, or some of the other measure-attached smart shapes as well.

If I had to add my own tip, it would be for musicians using chord symbols. Once you’ve created a palate of suffixes that you like, save the library. Then, if you work with someone else who doesn’t have your flair for visually stunning chords suffixes, you can just load your own library, delete theirs, and replace them with your own.

I also think it would be great if when working in a full score that is really tight, that you could highlight a page and then the program would increase/decrease the space between the staves so that there were no collisions.

But really, I can’t complain. I’ve said this before to you and I’ll stand by it. The work we do would quite literally not be possible without Finale. In fact, sometimes our workflow is so fast and accurate that I worry that we’ve set a pace that we won’t be able to maintain!

What’s next for you?

You know me, man—on to the next one. Wynton Marsalis, Jazz at Lincoln Center Orchestra and the New York Philharmonic premiering a new piece on December 28th at David Geffen Hall in New York City. Hopefully, they will have the music they need to play the concert!

I better get back to work!

Thanks to Jonathan, again, for taking the time to share his experiences with us. Please share your experiences with us via Facebook and Twitter.